The Tourism Administration on Monday opened a new office in Busan, hoping to draw visitors from southern South Korea to Taiwan and help push the number of South Korean arrivals back to the levels from prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the opening ceremony, Tourism Administration Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉) said that the new office would send Taiwan-South Korea tourism exchanges to new heights by promoting Taiwan’s culture, cruises and foods to prospective visitors in Busan and nearby areas.
About 550,000 South Korean passport holders visited Taiwan in the first 10 months of this year, making it the third-largest source of foreign arrivals, Tourism Administration data showed.
Photo courtesy of Tourism Administration
However, that number is only about 65 percent of what it was in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, when there were 1.24 million overseas arrivals from South Korea, the data showed.
Outbound travel by Taiwanese to South Korea has rebounded to about 90 percent of pre-COVID-19 levels in the past five months, the data showed.
The Busan office would offer tourism services and information for people in the four southern Korean metropolitan areas of Busan, Daegu, Gwangju and Ulsan, and other southern provinces, the Tourism Administration said.
Its main tasks would be to promote Taiwan as a tourist destination and attract more South Korean tourists from the nation’s south, it said.
The office would also work with travel agencies and airlines to promote Taiwan to independent travelers through forums, international tourism events, and multimedia advertising and promotional events, it said.
During the opening ceremony, several incentives and preferential offers were rolled out to lure potential tourists, including accommodation discount coupons worth NT$5,000 each.
The Busan office is Taiwan’s second tourism office in South Korea after a Seoul office.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday said that a surge in respiratory illnesses in China has been caused by at least seven types of pathogens, and small children, elderly people and immunocompromised people should temporarily avoid unnecessary visits to China. The recent outbreak of respiratory illnesses in China is mainly in the north and among children, CDC Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said on Monday. Data released by the Chinese National Health Commission on Sunday showed that among children aged one to four, the main pathogens were influenza viruses and rhinoviruses, while among children aged five to 14, the main pathogens
A study published by online booking platform Expedia revealed searches for travel to Taipei have ballooned 2,786 percent following the lifting of COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions due to the city being a “designation dupe” for Seoul. The TikTok trend for duping — referring to substituting a designation for a more inexpensive alternative — helped propel interest in Taipei, it said in a consumer survey titled “Unpack ‘24,” which was conducted from September to October in 14 countries. Location dupes are “every bit as delightful as the tried-and-true places travelers love,” Expedia trend tracker Melanie Fish said of the year’s popular alternatives, which
INCENTIVES: The province’s ‘21 measures’ include enhanced agricultural loans for Taiwanese farmers, and rent waivers and housing subsidies for Taiwanese start-ups China’s Fujian Province on Monday began implementing 15 economic measures targeting Taiwanese in its latest bid to fan pro-Beijing sentiment ahead of the Jan. 13 elections. Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency said the policies were part of “21 measures” unveiled in September by China for Fujian’s “integrated cross-strait development demonstration zone.” The partially implemented measures, which were created with input from Beijing, include reducing the wait time for Taiwanese applying for a visa from 20 days to five days and free public transit for Taiwanese older than 65, it said. Residents of Taiwan were granted use of the “all provincial Taiwanese entrepreneur compatriot
Tokyo has requested regions in southern Japan to accommodate people evacuated from Okinawa Prefecture in case of a war in the Taiwan Strait, Kyodo news agency reported on Monday. If a conflict breaks out across the Strait, people on the Sakishima Islands, which lie between Taiwan proper and Okinawa’s main island, would have to be evacuated from the prefecture, the news agency reported. An estimated 120,000 people would need to be moved, including 110,000 citizens and 10,000 tourists, it said. Niitani Koushi, who is in charge of crisis management at the Japanese Cabinet Secretariat, visited Yamaguchi Prefecture at the southern end of Japan’s
RSS