The Grand Hyatt Taipei hotel is to offer new dog-friendly rooms from Sept. 26, tapping the flourishing pet business, the Chinese-language United Daily News said yesterday.
Some of the rooms have already been booked at the hotel, which is the first in Taiwan to offer such services, the newspaper said.
The rooms, at the rear of the sixth floor, will provide bowls, mattresses and towels especially for dogs, the report said.
Hotels that cater to guests with pets have been around for many years in other countries, the report said, citing Grand Hyatt Taipei public relations manager Kuo Tzu-ching (郭子菁).
For example, Grand Hyatt Seattle started providing such services three years ago, Kuo said.
According to statistics from the Council of Agriculture, there were more than 2.3 million domesticated dogs and cats in Taiwan in 2013, an increase of more than 20 percent from two years earlier.
There are just over 23 million people in the nation.
Last year, there were 1,353 veterinarian hospitals nationwide.
Euromonitor market intelligence firm said the markets for pet food and supplies in the nation will reach NT$7.9 billion (US$240.6 million) and NT$9.3 billion respectively this year, an increase from NT$6.4 billion and NT$7.8 billion respectively in 2009.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
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