The Cabinet yesterday approved a tourism stimulus program that requires public servants to spend half of their holiday bonus on domestic travel amid a steep decline in Chinese visitors.
The measure is expected to generate tourism sector revenue of about NT$10.8 billion (US$337 million).
From next month, government employees are required to use half of their holiday allowance — generally about NT$16,000 given on Citizen Travel Cards — on domestic group tours, in a bid to boost the tourism industry.
The government spent NT$7.3 billion on holiday allowances last year, and the new measure is expected to inject at least NT$3.6 billion into the sector next year, Executive Yuan Spokesman Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) said.
“The figure should be tripled because government employees will take their families on vacation and there will be other expenses,” Hsu said.
The National Development Council said the measure applies to 500,000 employees who hold a Citizen’s Travel Card.
Department of Human Resources Development Director Lin Chih-mei (林至美) said that in the past, only 20 percent of the holiday allowance was spent on tourism, Lin said.
It is reasonable to assume that the stimulus program will create three times as much revenue as the amount of holiday allowance to be spent, as the government created NT$870 million in tourism revenue this year on a NT$300 million budget, Tourism Bureau Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉) said.
The number of Chinese travelers dropped by 34.72 percent in the second half of this year compared with the same period last year, and the government plans to encourage Taiwanese to counter the shortfall, Chou said.
To diminish the effect of the decline in Chinese tourists, the bureau has put forward programs to help tourism operators with an exclusively Chinese client base seek Taiwanese customers, with 292 businesses, or 67 percent of such operators, having received bureau aid, he said.
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