How will election controversies impact travel to Taiwan?

Travel Taiwan Travel
1

How will election controversies impact travel to Taiwan?

Seems like all those grand estimates of millions of new travellers to destination Taiwan are out the window now. Have heard Japanese are cancelling in droves, and they are biggest group to come here.

With all the emails all of us are receiving from our home countries – are you safe, come home immediately, don’t go outside, what’s happening there, is Taipei City really paralyzed, did the President get shot? – the image of Taiwan as subtropical paradise has been hit hard by the KMT shenanigans and all this post election stuff.

Tourist revenues could drop off by half, and it might take YEARS to recover a good image again. Taiwan? Oh, u mean that place where they stage assassinations and punch legislators? No way.

2

The “millions” of travellers was never gonna happen.

Life goes on around the country, despite the “crisis” portrayed in the media.

ZERO
impact.

3

[quote=“Closet Queen”]The “millions” of travellers was never gonna happen.

Life goes on around the country, despite the “crisis” portrayed in the media.

ZERO
impact.[/quote]

No, I mean, international travellers coming here for a week in the sun…

4

:laughing: Those damned European charter flights full of sun seekers and tofu connoisseurs. :laughing:

5

:laughing: Those damned European charter flights full of sun seekers and tofu connoisseurs. :laughing:[/quote]

Yes, jumbo jets direct from London, Paris, Berlin. On their way to the Great Wall of China…*

  • which, by the way, the Chinese propaganda commies now admit CANNOT be seen from the space shuttles… and are revising their textbooks thusly.
6

Everybody coming here are business travellers anyways.

7

The Japanese never came back 100 % after SARS ended. I guess Japanese are rather easily scared. If they see pictures of a couple of old men screaming and waving flags on one street in Taipei, they probably think the whole island is on fire.

Frankly, the KMT protest is small fry compared to what goes on in South Korea nearly every month, with molotov cocktails, fullscale clashes, police in battle gear …

And as to the government’s plan to double tourism, well that was a pipe dream right from the start, political crisis or not.

Talking of travel, if I had the opportunity now, I would try to go as far away from Taiwan and as long as possible, say, return here after the December Legislative Yuan elections.

8

I have been here thru several elections, nothing happens unless you go well & truly out of your way to find trouble.

9

True enough, enzo, but I had read just before the elections last week that the Japanese had recently begun booking trips to Taiwan again post SARS, and were beginning to come in flocks again. But now all that has changed again.

Yes, the Japanese are bashful travellers. They’ll go to Vietnam and Thailand now, forget Taiwan. And Guam and Hawaii.

And true, Mr He, mostly business travellers to Taiwan anyway, but this fiasco is going to take YEARS to fix PR-wise in the international mindset. Taiwan’s intl image has been set back at least 10 good years … and this thing aint even over yet.