Hoteliers in Kenting National Park are expecting a decline in occupancy rates during China’s National Day holiday, which began on Monday, due to a decline in the number of Chinese tourists.
Tourism operators and hoteliers consider the seven-day holiday, also known as the “Golden Week,” as the last chance to boost their business before Taiwan enters the off-peak travel season, as Chinese visit family or go on holidays.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) yesterday in a report quoted an anonymous hotel manager in Kenting as saying that business during the holiday would be only slightly better than a regular weekend and about the same as the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday last month.
Occupancy rates during the week might be 40 percent lower than a year earlier, the manager said, adding that hostels and car rental firms in Kenting are offering discounts to attract customers.
Asked why the number of Chinese tourists has been declining, some hoteliers told the newspaper that Beijing has deliberately curtailed the number of travelers to Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in May 2016, adding that the policy hit southern Taiwan the hardest.
The Chinese government hopes that economic issues would sway the results of next month’s nine-in-one elections, they said.
The decline in tourists also caused many vendors at the night market on Kenting Main Street to close early, the report said, adding that news about some popular hotels in the area closing down or changing ownership has been circulating all year.
A total of 2.11 million people visited Kenting National Park in the first seven months of this year, down by about 450,000 visitors from the same period a year earlier, park data show.
In its heyday, the park attracted up to 8.37 million people a year, the data show.
Some tourism operators also cited the local elections and the lengthy and complicated processes involved in applying for entry permits to Taiwan as reasons for the decline in Chinese tourists.
The National Immigration Agency asks Chinese applying for multiple-entry permits to provide supplementary information and to sign an affidavit promising that they will not engage in political activities during their visit to Taiwan, the operators said.
Chinese are asked to apply for a single-entry permit if they cannot state any compelling reason to apply for a multiple-entry permit, or if their reasons were rejected by immigration officials, they said.
Kenting’s night market was also earlier this year voted as one of the nation’s three worst night markets in a survey conducted by Yam News, after local media reported that night market vendors overcharged visitors.
Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Chang Chen-yuan (張政源) last month unveiled a plan to attract more domestic and Southeast Asian tourists to Kenting.
The ministry would also make sure that next year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival, which is to be held in Pingtung County, is a hit among visitors, Chang said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift