Irrational price cuts should be stopped to make way for cleaner competition in the booming online travel sector, the chief of the nation's first online ticketing center, ezfly.com (
"The quality of services might be affected if online travel agencies continue to engage in this kind of cut-throat competition," the company's president, Rafael Fang (
"As the industry only has a thin profit margin, going for the lowest market prices will only bring in an increased number of consumer complaints as quality cannot be maintained," he said, adding that offering reasonably cheap prices should be the long-term way for the sector to prosper.
Sharp price cuts are usually seen in popular routes to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and South Korea, as some companies do not hesitate to sacrifice margins to grab market share, said Jennifer Yu (尤慈霞), deputy manager of ezfly.com.
The company is the nation's third largest online travel service provider, according to ACNielsen Taiwan's latest report, issued last month.
In contrast to the company's pledge to place service quality before prices, its two major competitors -- Eztravel.com (
"Price competition is unavoidable when an industry is in its initial stage," said Ming Chen (
Launched in April last year, Star Travel, a subsidiary of Tsann Kuen Group (燦坤實業), has risen quickly to become the nation's second largest online ticketing company.
Not denying the company's ambition to scare away competitors with its pricing tactics, Chen said the company is maintaining quality as the majority of its products are standardized merchandise, such as entrance tickets to theme parks and independent travel packages, which seldom involve quality-related issues.
Despite its bold marketing strategy, Star Travel projects to generate NT$5 billion (US$152 million) in sales this year and break even next year, Chen said.
According to statistics from the Institute for Information Industry (資策會), the value of transactions in the nation's online travel business is expected to grow from last year's NT$10.6 billion to NT$15 billion by year-end, squeezing out traditional travel agencies.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS