TOURISM
Travelers shun eco hotels
Forty-two percent of Taiwanese travelers are not keen on staying in environmentally friendly hotels, the Global Earth Day survey published by Agoda.com, one of Asia’s leading hotel booking sites, showed yesterday. Although 47 percent of respondents said they support eco-friendly hotels, only 38 percent said they would be willing to pay an additional US$5 per night to check into such hotels. More than 30 percent of Taiwanese travelers only support environmentally friendly hotels in principle, but are unwilling to pay extra to stay in them. The survey also found that while 58 percent of all travelers said they prefer hotels that claim to be environmentally friendly, only 39 percent said they would pay an extra US$10 or more per night to stay in one.
TECHNOLOGY
App complements eateries
Searching for restaurants has become easier with the launch of a mobile application by restaurant Web site OpenRice Ltd yesterday. The free app allows anyone to find, rate and leave comments on more than 90,000 restaurants in Taiwan, as well as more than 1 million food outlets in nine Asian countries, according to the Web site. Founded in 1999 in Hong Kong and launching its operations in Taiwan in November last year, OpenRice is targeting 200,000 downloads of the app within a month, along with attracting 300,000 registered members to its Web site, OpenRice country manager Carlos Lee (李震中) said. OpenRice managing director Jan Wong said the Web site’s revenue comes from advertising, as well as back-end management services designed for restaurants, such as online reservations and promotional campaigns.
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
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,
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