The future of travel subsidies designed to boost domestic tourism depends on whether Beijing relaxes travel restrictions on its citizens visiting Taiwan, Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said on Tuesday.
Lin made the statement at the ministry’s New Year media conference when asked if the ministry would continue the subsidies this year.
“I cannot answer the question now, because it depends on Beijing’s policy on Chinese tourists traveling to Taiwan, which is not in our hands,” Lin said. “We welcome Chinese tourists and hope that the Chinese government lifts restrictions on tours to Taiwan after the elections on Saturday. If we receive a goodwill gesture [from Beijing], we could use a different approach to subsidize domestic tourists, or we might not necessarily have to use subsidies at all.”
Since 2018, the ministry has rolled out seven travel subsidies at a total cost of about NT$5.6 billion (US$186.1 million at the current exchange rate).
Although the Tourism Bureau has said the programs have increased hotel occupancy, some experts and travel agents have said that the subsidies were only “a quick dose of morphine.”
However, they also said that tourists would be less likely to travel the nation if the government ended them.
The subsidies have produced significant results in the short term, but their main purpose is to change how the nation’s tourism industry operates within one to two years, during which the quality and output value of domestic tourism could be enhanced, Lin said.
The government would assess whether these subsidies have created side effects, he said.
At a separate event, Lin said Taiwan should seek to attract more than 12 million international tourists this year, as last year it brought in 11.84 million.
“Chinese tourists, which account for about 25 percent of the nation’s international visitors, would be the main variable this year,” he said. “However, the nation still has room to grow in terms of tourists from Japan, South Korea and ASEAN nations.”
In response to a question on whether the government would cover the shortfall in revenue from the decrease in Chinese visitors by subsidizing domestic tourists, Tourism Bureau Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉) said that although domestic and international tourism are separate businesses, they would both affect hotel occupancy rates.
Travel subsidies are effective in raising hotel occupancy rates, but the nation needs to do more to encourage people to travel locally and spend more days at their travel destinations, he said.
Regarding international tourists, the bureau would expand its target from people who could travel to Taiwan by airplane within three hours to those who could arrive within five to eight hours, Chou said, adding that it would draw up plans to boost the revisit rate, as well as the average number of travel days among tourists from these areas.
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