Taiwan has a lot to offer international visitors and domestic tourists alike, but efforts to develop the nation’s travel/tourism industry are being hobbled by authorities’ scattergun approach to promotion and heavy-handed regulations.
Not only is a more holistic approach needed, but a more reality-based one as well.
A prime example of the flat-footedness of officialdom’s approach was the Tourism Bureau’s announcement that it would launch campaigns to boost interest in the high-heel glass-shoe-shaped structure in Chiayi County’s Budai Township (布袋) that opened in February last year.
The bureau’s Southwest Coast National Scenic Area administration built the shoe, which it calls both an art installation and a “wedding chapel,” yet its design was supposed to commemorate the history of “blackfoot disease” — a gangrenous condition caused by ingestion of arsenic-tainted water that peaked in the late 1950s and led to many people losing one or both feet to amputation.
The structure was not actually meant to be a chapel that would host weddings, but just a prop for wedding photographs — and part of a plan to develop the scenic area as a destination for what its officials called “romantic escapes, family outings and wedding ceremonies.”
The bizarre blue-glass shoe was so popular after it first opened that the crowds pouring into the township on weekends overloaded the roads and forced county officials to consider turning Budai’s third fishing port into a parking/transit area, where visitors could take a shuttle bus to the shoe, or hire a scooter.
However, visitor numbers have fallen sharply and officials at the scenic area administration are lamenting that they have been unable to find anyone to actually operate the venue or rent its shopping booths.
Their answer is that more promotions are needed to revive interest in the structure.
A more realistic answer would be to acknowledge that promotions might draw first-time visitors, but such things are not something that will attract a lot of repeat visits. Once you have seen it, or had wedding photographs taken there, why go back?
“If you build it, they will come,” was a great tag line for the Hollywood movie Field of Dreams — and the baseball field that was made for the film still draws people. They come because they already have a strong emotional connection to the film or to see games played there, but not in the numbers they did in the first years after the movie’s release.
The shoe debacle is symptomatic of many of the problems that face the nation’s tourism industry, whether one is aiming at foreign visitors or local residents.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications earlier this year said it would promote ecotourism to attract international visitors in place of the declining number of Chinese visitors, with the Tourism Bureau talking about tours focusing on fireflies, eagles, milkweed butterflies, whale-watching and visits to Aboriginal villages.
Those are by nature small-scale tours that could never replace the numbers involved in the large-scale tours designed to take Chinese tourists to crowd-intensive sites such as Taipei 101, the National Palace Museum, Sun Moon Lake or Alishan.
And why just focus on the international market when developing such tours?
Efforts to promote a more systematic “authorized guide” system have also foundered, as it is difficult for local and specialty guides to become licensed.
At the opening of the Taipei Tourism Expo in May, Vice President Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said that travel and tourism would become the nation’s next “trillion-dollar industry.”
It might, but not if authorities on the central and local level continue to try to latch onto the latest craze or chase the next big thing, whatever that might be.
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