The Tourism Bureau said yesterday that travel agencies were entitled to deduct 5 percent from the total cost of package tours if customers cancel tours to Thailand.
After supporters of former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra launched a new series of protests, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday raised its travel alert to Bangkok and seven other cities surrounding the capital to “orange,” meaning that travelers should avoid visiting these areas.
STANDARDIZED
The Tourism Bureau said that standardized contracts regulating overseas tours have clear instructions on how the travel agencies should refund customers in the event of an orange travel alert.
If customers decide to withdraw from the tour, travel agencies must refund their money after deducting no more than 5 percent of the total tour cost. The deducted amount will be used to pay the processing fees to cancel tickets and visa application fees, the bureau said.
POSTPONE
If customers do not want to lose any money, they can opt to postpone the trip or visit other areas instead, the bureau added.
The Travel Quality Assurance Association (TQAA) said that agencies generally do not charge exactly 5 percent of the package cost.
They collect the funds on behalf of airlines and other organizations, not for themselves.
When asked if the protests launched by Thaksin’s supporters were likely to affect travel to Thailand, TQAA spokesperson Jones Chen (陳屬庄) said the association predicted the protests would be over within a week.
Chen said that this was not the first pro-Thaksin protest.
Apart from the one in November 2008 that shut down the airport, all the protests have ended peacefully, he said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS