Eight months after China instructed its travel agencies and airline companies to halt flights to Palau, Palau Pacific Airways has announced that it plans to drop its flight path from Koror, Palau, to Hong Kong due to significant financial losses.
Sea Passion Group — owner of Palau Pacific Airways and the Sea Passion Hotel — made the statement to the Palauan Congress in a report last week, the Palauan Island Times reported.
Palau Pacific Airways is the only local airline in Palau.
Photo courtesy of AimHit Sports Marketing and Communication Consultants Co
While Palauan President Tommy Remengesau in November last year said that China’s no-fly restriction against Palau would not hurt Palau’s economy, but would instead offer diversity for its tourism market, things are looking grim from the Pacific island nation, the newspaper said.
China applied the restrictions in an attempt to pressure Palau to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China.
The restrictions have resulted in the airline and hotel having no reservations for either this month or next month, the group’s report said.
The number of tourists has dropped by more than half, with the nation recording only 25,000 tourists for the first six months of this year, the report said, adding that since China issued the no-fly order, Palau has seen a 16 percent decrease in Chinese tourists.
Palau recorded 91,000 visits from Chinese nationals in 2015 and 70,000 in 2016, comprising nearly half of its foreign tourists, government statistics showed.
By contrast, the average number of tourists visiting Palau from Japan and Taiwan totaled 10,000 and 30,000 respectively, the statistics showed.
“While China has enacted a policy of checking online and physical travel agencies for compliance to state policy, the policy was not strictly enforced until now,” the newspaper quoted the Sea Passion Group report as saying.
Delta Airlines in February announced that it was terminating services from the Northern Marianas to Japan, and had pulled out of Koror as of May, citing low demand, the report said.
Starting last month and continuing until next month, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is adding two direct flights per week to Palau in support of Remengesau’s policy to diversify the tourist population visiting Palau, ministry spokesman Andrew Lee (李憲章) said yesterday.
“We welcome all foreign travelers visiting Palau to make use of the increased number of direct flights between Koror and Taoyuan to better explore Palau and its wonderful marine scenery,” he said.
China Airlines, the main airline flying the Koror-Taoyuan route, had flown 18 flights as of May and had carried more than 2,015 passengers.
Additional reporting by Chen Yi-chia
Japan has deployed long-range missiles in a southwestern region near China, the Japanese defense minister said yesterday, at a time when ties with Beijing are at their lowest in recent years. The missiles were installed in Kumamoto in the southern region of Kyushu, as Japan is attempting to shore up its military capacity as China steps up naval activity in the East China Sea. “Standoff defense capabilities enable us to counter the threat of enemy forces attempting to invade our country ... while ensuring the safety of our personnel,” Japanese Minister of Defense Shinjiro Koizumi said. “This is an extremely important initiative for
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) today accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to lead a delegation to China next month, saying she hopes to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and bring stability to the Taiwan Strait. “I am grateful and happy to accept this invitation,” Cheng said in a statement from the KMT chairperson’s office. Cheng said she hopes both sides can work together to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations, enhance exchange and cooperation, bring stability to the Taiwan Strait and improve people’s livelihoods. At today's news conference, Cheng said any efforts to
MORE POPULAR: Taiwan Pass sales increased by 59 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the Tourism Administration said The Tourism Administration yesterday said that it has streamlined the Taiwan Pass, with two versions available for purchase beginning today. The tourism agency has made the pass available to international tourists since 2024, allowing them to access the high-speed rail, Taiwan Railway Corp services, four MRT systems and four Taiwan Tourist Shuttles. Previously, five types of Taiwan Pass were available, but some tourists have said that the offerings were too complicated. The agency said only two types of Taiwan Pass would be available, starting from a three-day pass with the high-speed rail and a three-day pass with Taiwan Railway Corp. The former costs NT$2,800
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
RSS