With an estimated 300,000 South Korean tourists visiting Taipei this year thanks to the direct flight service which operates between Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) and Gimpo Airport in Seoul, the Taipei City Department of Information and Tourism is offering budget tour packages aimed at tourists from the country that include coupons for various retail outlets.
The department said it will provide NT$30,000 of coupons to South Korean visitors while well-known hotels in Taipei, including the W Hotel Taipei and Radium Kagaya, will also offer discounts, it added.
Commissioner Chao Hsin-ping (趙心屏) said the department had invited 15 journalists and travel bloggers from South Korea to experience the charms of the city and it would take them to handicraft stores and Taiwanese designers’ shops, given that South Korean tourists are interested in the city’s cultural and creative industries, during a three-day city promotion tour.
Meanwhile, a total of 15 Chinese journalists are to be invited to Taipei today to tour the city. Chinese tourists remain the biggest group of foreign tourists who visit Taiwan.
“Taipei’s popularity as a tourist destination is growing among South Korean tourists, especially individual tourists and backpackers. We expect the promotional program to attract more tourists to visit Taipei, boosting tourism in our city,” Chao said.
The city will arrange for the journalists and travel bloggers to visit major attractions today, including Beitou Hot Spring Museum, Beitou Library and the National Palace Museum, as well as Zhongshan N Street, where many Taiwanese designers have opened shops, the department said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,