The number of international visitors to Taiwan last month fell by 3.44 percent from a year ago, the first time tourist numbers posted a decline in August since the SARS outbreak in 2003, according to figures released by the Tourism Bureau.
The sharpest decline was in the number of Chinese tourists, which accounted for about 40 percent of the nation’s 10.43 million international visitors so far this year.
The figures showed that the number of Chinese tourists decreased by 32.41 percent to about 249,000 last month. Chinese tourists arriving with tour groups were down by 54.96 percent to about 73,000.
The number of Chinese tourists arriving in tour groups had fallen by 8 percent between January and July compared with the same period last year, the bureau said.
However, the number of individual Chinese visitors rose 13.82 percent during the same period.
In contrast with the decline in the number of Chinese tourists, figures showed that the number of Japanese visitors rose by 30.32 percent to 187,065 last month. Tourists from South Korea increased by 43.64 percent to 78,023.
The number of Thai tourists increased by 67.94 percent to 13,632 last month, while the number of Vietnamese and Philippine tourists rose by 32.24 percent and 21.42 percent to 17,041 and 13,130, respectively.
The decline in the number of Chinese tourists arriving via tours had prompted some of the nation’s tourism service providers to hold a large protest earlier this month.
To make up for the loss in international tourists and boost domestic tourism, the bureau last week met with representatives from seven counties and cities that were hardest hit to talk about the possibility of building a platform to integrate various tourism sources.
The cities and counties are New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Kaohsiung and Taitung, as well as Nantou, Chiayi and Hualien counties.
The bureau said it is encouraging travel operators to offer various package tours, which would be promoted by the bureau.
Subsidies would also be provided to domestic travelers spending nights outside their home towns, it added.
The funding for the subsidies could come from different government agencies, such as the Hakka Affairs Council, which promotes tours to Hakka communities, or the Council of Indigenous Peoples, which brings tourists to the nation’s Aboriginal communities.
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