The Tourism Bureau warned travel agencies yesterday that they could be legally liable if they take tour groups in the near future to Japan’s Aomori, Iwate, Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures, areas devastated by Friday’s massive earthquake and tsunami.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday night issued a red alert for travel to those areas, essentially telling people to stay away, and indicating that travel agencies ignoring the alert could be subject to legal liabilities, Tourism Bureau Deputy Director-General Wayne Liu (劉喜臨) said.
Tour groups scheduled to visit other parts of Japan, however, were allowed to stick to their -itineraries since no other area in Japan was included in the ministry’s highest-level travel alert, Liu said.
Photo: CNA
Travel agencies in Taiwan have reached an agreement to suspend trips to the Tokyo area as a result of safety concerns.
Secretary-general of the Travel Agent Association of ROC Taiwan Roger Hsu (許高慶) said that because many hotels in Tokyo have experienced water and power outages, travel agencies have decided to temporarily suspend tour groups until the situation there becomes clearer.
Flights from Taiwan to the Tokyo area have returned to normal with two international airports in the Japanese capital reopened after being shut down following the magnitude 8.9 earthquake that rattled the eastern half of Honshu.
As of yesterday afternoon, 40 Taiwanese tour groups with 1,087 travelers in Tokyo had been confirmed as safe, the bureau said.
Hsu said the association would help arrange for 300 travelers with 11 tour groups to take flights back to Taiwan later yesterday.
China Airlines, Taiwan’s biggest carrier, also said it would send bigger aircraft to help bring home travelers still held up at Tokyo’s Narita Airport.
Meanwhile, at a separate setting yesterday, Taipei Japanese School principal Akira Suzuki expressed concern about the situation in Japan and said some faculty members’ homes in Japan had suffered serious damage.
Some of the school’s 29 faculty member homes in Japan had been damaged by the -tsunami Suzuki said at the school’s graduation ceremony, without identifying how many were affected or where they were from.
Suzuki said many teachers and staffers were ready to fly home to Japan now that the semester had ended, but were worried that flights would be canceled or postponed because of the quake.
The principal gave assurances that the school took disaster prevention in Taiwan seriously and held fire drills every semester to prepare for any eventualities.
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