The Tourism Bureau said yesterday that seminars were held at 10 of Taiwan’s foreign representative offices last week as part of the bureau’s efforts to seek creative ways of promoting the country’s tourism.
The bureau said the three-day seminars took place on July 29 at the Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Frankfurt offices.
In the press release, the bureau said: “The seminars were geared toward finding creative ways to promote tourism in Taiwan through brainstorming, analyzing market information and taking into consideration the specific needs of each of the overseas regions.”
The bureau invited the heads of the 10 offices to analyze the preferences of residents in each of the foreign cities and come up with better promotion ideas.
The meeting discussed topics such as how to attract tourists from emerging markets and how to develop the Taiwan market for bicycle and leisure tours.
“The participants at the seminars all expressed confidence in the revival of the tourism market in the latter half of the year, anticipating that the economic situation would improve and more people would start traveling again as the global outbreak of A(H1N1) influenza becomes milder,” the bureau said.
The Tokyo office said that from January to June, the number of Japanese traveling abroad was down by 37.1 percent compared with the same period last year, with the number of Japanese tourists to Taiwan dropping 4 percent in that period.
Many new programs, such as “good luck tours” and packages with culinary themes that target Japanese tourists will be launched next year, which has been designated as “Taiwan-Japan Tourism Exchange Year,” the office said.
The Los Angeles office said it would develop “stopover” tour packages and cooperate with other Asian countries to encourage tourists visiting China to include Taiwan on their itinerary.
The Executive Yuan launched a NT$30 billion (NT$916 million) program in April in an effort to turn Taiwan into a regional tourism hub that could generate NT$550 billion in revenue in four years and help create 400,000 jobs in the tourism industry by 2012.
The government has set a goal of 4.1 million foreign tourist arrivals for this year, 4.5 million for next year, 5 million for 2011 and 5.5 million for 2012.
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