The Taipei International Travel Fair is holding its annual show next month at the Nangang Exhibition Center, with more than 1,700 participants from over 60 countries seeking to attract customers and ramp up business, despite an economic slowdown.
The most high-profile event for the travel and tourism industry is to take place from Nov. 8 to 11, as the government struggles to mitigate the impact of China’s ban on individual tourists visiting Taiwan.
“The active participation by domestic and foreign companies shows the importance they assign to the local tourism market,” event organizer the Taiwan Visitors Association said.
Photo: Courtesy of Taiwan Tourism Bureau
The trade show last year drew 376,773 visitors, an increase of 2.66 percent from 2017, bucking expectations of a decline because of fast-growing competition from e-commerce platforms.
Japan — Taiwanese travelers’ favorite destination — has booked 175 booths for this year, while South Korea is holding a cultural travel exhibition, aided by celebrity endorsers, the organizer said.
The Solomon Islands, which switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing last month, has signed up for the event, as well as companies from Brazil and Argentina, it said.
Montenegro and Northern Cyprus are to join the travel fair for the first time.
Chinese travel service providers will not take part in the show for the third consecutive year, the organizer said.
Central and local government agencies will boost their presence to promote domestic travel, it added.
Major hospitality groups have announced discount offers to drive up sales for this quarter and beyond.
Landis Hospitality Group (麗緻餐旅集團), which operates six hotels across Taiwan, is to offer special promotion packages at up to 70 percent off regular charges, with an aim to boost sales by 10 percent.
“The annual fair was a key growth driver in the past and hopefully would do the same this year,” Landis food and beverage manager Gary Lo (羅明威) said.
Landis Resort Yangmingshan (陽明山中國麗緻大飯店) and Wulai Pause Landis Resorts (璞石麗緻溫泉會館) are likely to benefit, as winter is the high season for hotels with hot spring facilities, Lo said.
Cosmos Hotel & Resorts Group (天成飯店集團), which runs nine hotel and restaurant brands in Taiwan, is to highlight its luxury facility, Grand Cosmos Resort Ruisui (瑞穗春天國際觀光酒店) in Hualien, with special packages priced from NT$9,900 per night, or 72 percent off price tags, the Taipei-based company said.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
RSS