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Taiwan Achieves World's Highest First-half Growth in International Tourist Arrivals

2014/11/05 | By Judy Li

Taiwan's international tourist arrivals grew by a sizzling 26.7% in the first half of this year, edging ahead of Japan's 26.4% to take the top spot among 50 advanced economies, according to statistics recently released by the United Nations Word Tourism Organization (UNWTO).

In the same period the number of global international tourist arrivals rose by 4.6% from a year earlier, to 517 million. Growth in the Asia-Pacific was higher at 5.4%, with Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong all witnessing a double-digit rise.

Taiwan's revenues from international tourists rose 18.5% year-on-year during the six-month period, lower only than Japan's 27.5% and South Korea's 25.2%.

Industry insiders say that Taiwan's soaring tourist arrivals figures were due mainly to the increased arrival of mainland Chinese tourists since the second half of 2008, when Chinese were first allowed to visit Taiwan for tourism. Taiwan's vigorous promotion of its unique attractions and cultural/creative travel has also helped attract more international tourists, especially from neighboring South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Statistics compiled by the Taiwan Tourism Bureau show that the island recorded 5.8376 million arrivals from Asia in the first eight months of this year, up by a sharp 27.91% from the corresponding months of 2013. In the same period the number of visitors from South Korea boasted the highest growth rate of 72.96%; those from mainland China went up 37.35%, and those from Japan 17.95%.

Airline companies, travel agencies, hotels, restaurants, souvenir stores, and other tourism-related operations on the island are benefiting from the thriving tourism market.

To accommodate the flood of international tourists, new hotels have sprung up rapidly in recent years; this year the number of new hotels on the island has grown by almost one a week, boosting the number of tourist hotels to 3,399 at the end of August. The number of available hotel rooms now stands at 165,000, up more than 5,000 since the beginning of the year.

In August the room occupancy rate of Taiwan's star-rated tourist hotels reached 71%, up 3.5 percentage points from the same month of last year; the average room rate was NT$3,705 (US$123.5), up 2.1%. For budget hotels such as Just Sleep, amba, Ulysses Hotel, Bee House, and Orange Hotels, the average occupancy rate was a stunning 95%. (JL)