Eight hotels and two spas in Taiwan were among this year’s Forbes Travel Guide Star Award winners, including the Mandarin Oriental Taipei (文華東方酒店), the only resort in the country to receive a five-star rating.
Forbes Travel Guide on Tuesday published online a list of the winners, with 1,830 hotels, restaurants and spas worldwide given five stars, four stars or a “recommended” rating.
The guide’s inspectors stayed at candidate accommodations for three days and two nights, posing as ordinary guests, to assess up to 900 objective criteria such as decor quality and staff courtesy, it said on its Web site.
Photo courtesy of Mandarin Oriental Taipei
Mandarin Oriental Taipei general manager Karan Berry said he is honored that his establishment received five stars for the sixth consecutive year.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the global tourism industry hard over the past two years, but Mandarin Oriental Taipei has stayed true to its values, providing customers with exquisite services without compromising on quality, Berry said.
Forbes Travel Guide’s five-star ratings are awarded only to “outstanding, often iconic properties with virtually flawless service and amazing facilities,” the Web site said.
Worldwide, 323 hotels received the rating this year.
Four hotels in Taiwan — the Regent Taipei (台北晶華酒店), Taipei Marriott Hotel (台北萬豪酒店), W Taipei and Shangri-La’s Far Eastern Plaza Hotel Taipei (台北遠東國際大飯店) — received four-star ratings, which indicates that they are “exceptional properties, offering high levels of service and quality of facility to match,” the Web site says.
They were among 558 hotels worldwide to receive a four-star rating this year, Forbes Travel Guide said.
Grand Hyatt Taipei (台北君悅大飯店) and Humble House Taipei (寒舍艾麗) were rated “recommended,” which overall was given to 401 “excellent properties with consistently good service and facilities,” it said.
Although no restaurants in Taiwan made the list, The Spa at the Mandarin Oriental Taipei and the Wellspring Spa at Regent Taipei received four-star ratings.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
RSS