A rapid growth in low-cost flights to Taiwan has helped raise the number of arrivals by nearly 16 percent in the first seven months of this year, compared with the same period last year, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said on Tuesday.
Last year, 10.63 million people flew into or out of Taiwan on budget airlines, the first time that the number surpassed 10 million, the agency said.
The nation is serviced by 23 budget airlines, including one that started offering flights to Taiwan this year, it added.
Photo: Chuang Shih-hsien, Taipei Times
They operate 61 flights between Taiwan and East and Southeast Asia, it said.
From January to last month, the number of budget airline passengers reached 7.06 million, a 15.6 percent year-on-year increase, it said.
Budget airline passengers accounted for about 20 percent of all international and cross-strait fliers during the period, the agency added.
The first low-cost carrier to offer services to Taiwan was Singapore-based Jetstar Asia Airways, which launched a service between Taipei and Singapore in December 2004.
It was followed by Cebu Pacific Air of the Philippines in 2007 and Kuala Lumpur-based AirAsia in July 2009.
Tigerair Taiwan dominates the budget market with a 23.2 percent market share, followed by Singapore-based Scoot Tigerair, which claims 11.26 percent, statistics showed.
The Osaka, Japan-based Peach Aviation was third with 9.12 percent, followed by Hanoi-based VietJet Air (8.16 percent), Osaka-based Vanilla Air (6.64 percent) and AirAsia (5.08 percent), the agency added.
In related news, AirAsia on Tuesday celebrated the 10th anniversary of the launch of its Taipei service.
With 13 direct flights to Malaysia, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand from Taipei and Kaohsiung, the budget airline has serviced more than 6.6 million passengers since 2009, it said.
Average occupancy of the flights was 85.7 percent in the first half of this year, it said, adding that passengers to and from Taiwan could exceed 1.8 million this year.
Asked why is has not created a Taiwanese spinoff, given the significant growth in the market, AirAsia X Berhad CEO Benyamin Ismail told a news conference in Taipei that the key lies in finding local partners with similarly progressive business mindsets.
“We would explore this opportunity in any market, but the difficulty of setting up a joint venture is to try to find the right partner. If we can find a right partner, it would be great,” he said, adding that the company sees potential for a spinoff in Taiwan, Vietnam or China.
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
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
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