Government efforts to attract more visitors from Southeast Asia have been hampered by a lack of guides proficient in the region’s languages, a Tourism Bureau report said.
Taiwan has only 56 tour guides who are proficient in Thai, 34 in Indonesian, 26 in Vietnamese and seven in Malay, the bureau said.
One legislator said that the number of Southeast Asian tourists visiting Taiwan each year is equivalent to one Malay-speaking guide serving 29,965 Malaysian tourists, or one guide per 4,275 Vietnamese tourists and one per 2,329 Thai tourists.
Asean Travel Service general manager Chiu Yi-chuan (邱義筌) said that his company used to see only about 10 tour groups from the region per month when Taiwan still required visitor visas from these countries.
However, after President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration introduced visa-free travel to several Southeast Asian nations, that number jumped to 20 groups per month last year, Chiu said.
The figure rose further to 40 groups per month, bolstered by increasing interest among travelers from the Philippines and Vietnam, he said.
The company needs at least 20 tour guides to handle the rising demand, but it has only five, he added.
Eagle Tour chairman Lin Yu-hua (林玉華) said her company deals with 50 to 60 tour groups a month from Thailand alone.
Her 15 Vietnamese-speaking tour guides are also struggling to meet the demand.
“There is demand from even more tour groups, but we do not have enough Vietnamese-speaking guides,” Lin said.
The government’s advice that travel agencies employ translators and interpreters would not work because they need experienced tour guides, Lin said.
Lin said she only recruits interpreters when there is no other option, adding that the real solution would be training more professional tour guides.
Chiu agreed, saying interpreters generally fail to present tour-related information in a manner that tourists find interesting.
Tourism Bureau Director Huang Yi-cheng (黃易成) said the government began a training program to increase the number of speakers of underrepresented languages two years ago, with 56 of the 176 registered students having passed the program’s exams.
The majority of those who signed up for foreign-language tour guide certification in the past were new immigrants, Huang said, adding that the bureau plans to promote the program at universities to attract overseas students.
Huang Ching-chang (黃慶章), head of the Ministry of Examination’s professional and technical exams bureau, said that the low passing rate for certification among new immigrants was not unexpected, as many of them have other responsibilities, such as caring for their families.
He suggested having immigrants first work with tour guides as assistants, where they could earn money and valuable experience at the same time.
The rapid growth in tourism from Southeast Asian countries began only about a year ago with Tsai’s “new southbound policy,” which aims to bolster economic ties with those countries.
Learning a language well takes one to two years and meeting the new tourism-related language demands cannot be done quickly, Huang Ching-chang said.
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