Thirty to 40 percent of group tours have said they want to cancel tours to Japan since the government on Friday issued a “level 1” travel advisory for the nation, travel agents said.
The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) issued the “watch” travel notice for Japan, saying that people planning to travel there should take precautions against COVID-19 infection.
The government’s three-tier travel advisory system has level 1, urging people to take normal precautions and respect disease-prevention measures at their destination; level 2 — “alert” — urging people to be vigilant; and level 3 — “warning” — which cautions against nonessential travel.
Photo: Tsai Tsung-hsien, Taipei Times
Travel Agents’ Association chairman Hsiao Po-jen (蕭博仁) said that travel companies have been receiving telephone calls from people inquiring about the status of tours to Japan, and 30 to 40 percent of them asked if they could cancel their trips.
“We can only monitor the government’s announcements on the status of the disease and accept requests to cancel tours,” Hsiao said. “If the government does not want people to travel to Japan, it might as well raise the level to 3 so that we can offer full refunds.”
“The last thing we want is for the government issue a level 1 warning for Japan, then change it to level 2 two days later and to level 3 a few days afterward,” he said.
Travel agents and customers are facing difficult decisions over whether to cancel tours, as flights to areas that have reported COVID-19 infections continue to operate and normal flight tickets are non-refundable, Hsiao said.
People have also asked to cancel tours to Singapore, although at a far lower rate than for those to Japan.
Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) on Saturday said that Japan has been transparent about confirmed cases of COVID-19 and the government would respond to information from it accordingly.
“Although there are cases of human-to-human transmission in Japan, the source of infection remains unclear and the infected area is relatively small,” Lin said. “We follow instructions from the CECC.”
The Consumer Protection Committee said that from Jan. 23 to Saturday, it had received 490 complaints about tour cancelations, with about 18 percent of them being tours to Japan.
If people want to cancel tours to places under a level 1 alert, terms of the Fixed Contracts for Overseas Tours state that they are to pay the organizing company 5 to 100 percent of tour fees after deducting nonrefundable charges, depending on the number of days before the scheduled departure, the committee said.
However, if they cancel tours to level 2 areas, they shall pay no more than 5 percent of the total travel expenses, it said.
For tours to level 3 areas, either party may cancel without being subject to liability for compensation, as the contract cannot be completely fulfilled due to force majeure, or causes not attributable to either party, the committee said.
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