Tens of thousands of Taiwanese who were planning to travel to Japan in the next few weeks have decided to visit Southeast Asia instead, as Japan copes with the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, local travel agencies said.
An estimated 50,000 people who had signed up for group tours to Japan for the cherry-blossom season have canceled their trips, Travel Agent Association of ROC, Taiwan chairman Yao Ta-kuan (姚大光) said.
In addition, about 100,000 independent travelers have canceled their trips to Japan, he added.
ALTERNATIVES
Lion Travel Service, one of the nation’s largest travel agencies, said 50 percent of its clients who had booked trips to Japan have decided to travel instead to Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.
Another 20 percent chose South Korea and 10 percent plan to go to China, the agency said.
Castle Travel Service, another travel agency, said it believed that many of the 1 million Taiwanese who travel to Japan every year would still travel abroad.
“Based on our conservative estimate, about a third of these people will go to Southeast Asia,” said the agency’s general manager, surnamed Wu (吳).
CHARTER FLIGHTS
To capitalize on what they see as a possible increase in the number of tourists to Southeast Asia, some travel agencies are negotiating with airline companies to arrange charter flights to Bangkok and Phuket Island in Thailand and Kuala Lumpur, Wu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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