The government is to step up the pressure on tour operators that offer low-price packages to budget travelers and receive payments from retail outlets, Executive Yuan spokesman Tung Chen-yuan (童振源) said yesterday.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) is to intensify legal oversight and the Ministry of Finance is to launch an in-depth tax investigation of such operators, he said.
The MOTC is to clamp down on package tours that hard-sell shopping trips to visitors, he said.
The MOTC also plans to attract more independent Chinese travelers, he said.
“The plans include developing short-term packages with customized in-depth tours to diversify travel options, aimed at eliminating so-called ‘zero-fee’ package tour operations that make their money by selling overpriced goods to tourists,” Tung said.
The announcement came after Premier Lin Chuan’s (林全) pledge to wipe out “zero-fee” and low-price tour operations on Tuesday.
During a legislative question-and-answer session on Tuesday, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Liu Shih-fang (劉世芳) asked Lin if the nation has the will to clamp down on low-quality tour operations and follow in the footsteps of Thailand, which recently froze billions of baht and impounded more than 1,000 tour buses of a group offering “zero-fee” tours.
The fall in the number of Chinese tour groups has had a major short-term impact on the nation’s tourism sector, but the government has proposed long-term measures to revive tourism, including relief loans, a visa-waiver program for Southeast Asian travelers and a project to boost domestic tourism, Lin said.
“Our fate is in our hands. Taiwan has a diverse tourist base and it is not necessary to rely on a single market as long as the competitiveness of the tourism industry can be improved,” 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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