Visitors to Taipei are expected to spend a total of US$8.1 billion this year, making the city the sixth-highest grossing destination in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of visitor expenditure, according to the annual MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index, released yesterday.
Taipei is expected to attract 5.2 million overnight visitors this year, ranking eighth in the region in visitor numbers, behind Tokyo and followed by Beijing and Guangzhou.
In terms of tourist spending in the region, Taipei’s US$8.1 billion is forecast to be followed by US$7.8 billion for Kuala Lumpur and US$6.9 billion for Shanghai.
The report this year is dominated by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, as among the 132 cities across the world polled, 42 destinations are in Asia.
According to the report, Bangkok, with up to 15.98 million expected visitors, overtook London to rank as the top destination in the world by visitor arrivals, the first time an Asian city has topped the list since it was established in 2010.
London took second place, followed by Paris, Singapore, New York, Istanbul and Dubai. Taipei ranked 18th in the world.
New York is expected to have the highest visitor expenditure in the world this year at US$18.6 billion, according to the report.
The MasterCard Index ranks cities in terms of the number of their total international visitor arrivals and the amount they spend, as well as providing forecasts for future numbers, its Web site 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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching