Hotel operators in Pingtung County’s Kenting Township (墾丁) said there has been a decline in the number of room reservations for the Tomb Sweeping Day long weekend after organizers of the Spring Wave Music and Art Festival announced this year’s event is to be held in Taipei.
The Spring Wave event is part of the Kenting Music Festival, which has been held in Kenting for the past 11 years and provides an annual boost to the local tourism industry.
Spring Wave organizers last month announced that this year’s festival was being moved to the Dajia Riverside Park in Taipei because the Pingtung County Government no longer agrees to have the event held at Hengchun Airport, and another appropriate venue could not be found in Kenting National Park.
Kenting hostel owner Hung Ya-ling (洪雅玲) said that hotels in the area usually start receiving reservations for the festival weekend after the Lunar New Year holiday, with about 80 percent of rooms booked before the festival begins.
However, she said that this year her hotel has not even received reservations for 50 percent of its rooms.
Hung said that her hostel has received telephone calls from guests asking whether this year’s festival will still be held in Kenting, and if not, they would be canceling their reservations.
She said that they had to explain that the “Spring Wave” event is only one part of the Kenting Music Festival.
The Howard Beach Resort Kenting and the Caesar Park Kenting hotels have also reported a decline in the number of reservations.
Some guests believed that their room rates were hiked due to the festival, a hotel clerk said, adding that the relocation of the Spring Wave event has greatly affected the other events that make up the Kenting Music Festival.
The Kenting Music Festival has been around longer than the Spring Wave event, Kenting Borough Warden Chang Chang-yi (張昌益) said, adding that over the past few years, the Spring Wave event has slowly been losing its popularity.
Meanwhile, the Kenting Community Development Association said rumors that this year’s music festival had been canceled have already affected spring vacation profits in the region.
The association said that the region might be looking at a loss of hundreds of millions of New Taiwan dollars if the rumors are allowed to continue, adding that there should be efforts to spread a message that this year’s festival has not been canceled and it is only one event that has been relocated to Taipei.
This year’s Kenting Music Festival is to host three main events: Spring Scream, Spring Break, and the Spring Asia Mixx from April 2 to April 4; as well as the White Foam Party on April 2 and April 3.
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