A group of unhappy tour group members have appeared in court to press their case for compensation from Phoenix Tours for failing to take them on a salmon-spotting trip as promised during a trip to Canada.
The 25 tourists, who paid NT$110,000 apiece for a 10-day Canadian Rocky Mountain autumn tour in October last year, said the agency promised them a salmon-spotting trip in Roderick Haig Brown Provincial Park or at Goldstream River on Vancouver Island.
However, the agency’s tour guide, surnamed Wu (吳), failed to take them to either location and instead just brought them to a river behind their hotel to see salmon.
Tour members who testified at a trial hearing at the Taipei District Court on Thursday said they did not see “a single salmon” and asked the agency for NT$980,000 to cover a portion of the tour’s costs and compensate them for emotional distress.
During the hearing, Wu said that he simply forgot to take the tourists to Roderick Haig Brown Provincial Park.
Soon after the incident, Phoenix Tours staff tried to placate angry tour group members by presenting them with frozen salmon as gifts, but the gesture had little effect.
A manager at Phoenix Tours said that the incident was a clear lapse on Wu’s part and he said the agency was willing to compensate the group for its losses.
However, the two sides have not been able to agree on appropriate compensation, which is why the case is in court, he 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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