Watching PTS news in English at 11:45pm on channel 13.
They say a new hotel opens every 36 hours in Taiwan over last 2 years and the occupancy rate is 20 to 30%.
Not good for the hotels but good for us travelers to keep the price down and the room availability up. Recently spent a couple nights in Taichung and the room was 800 per night for two people including buffet breakfast, Wi-Fi and underground parking.
Occupancy rate may go up in the near future but prices will not go up much because the new market southeast Asia doesn’t spend a lot on travel.
Maybe they meant 80 to 70%? My friends from Singapur and Hong Kong usually stay around Main Station or Ximenting and heck it is hard to find accommodation, mostly full, and not on typical vacation seasons.
Once or twice they have ended up in hotels near Zhongshiao, because there is no vacancy.
I love it though that I see small groups: Hong Kong families including grandma, Japanese couples or pals and classmates on graduation trips, Singapur coworkers on company trips, Malasyan or Filipino engineers on breaks from conventions or training seminars. Very nice and healthy tourism, me thinks.
How many hotels go out of business each month I wonder. We just came back from Hualien and we found that many B&Bs along the coastal road seemed pretty empty/abandoned.
That is because of the earthquake. Occupancy has diminished to levels never seen before. The government is giving a lot of incentive sfor people to travel to Hualien but the situation is dire.
I considered that. But that’s seems way too high. Except for popular spots, many hotels around Taiwan are very low occupancy especially during weekdays.
Yep, but the ones in Ximenting and Main Station are ridiculously full. I blame that on teh lack of tourism info, where peoople come to visit Taipei only, and a fewe attractions at that, as there are few foreign language resources to get out independently, and the established tours go to the same stale places.
Unless you have been here a while, moving around with limited or no Chinese makes people think Taipei Main is all there is. Like headfing straight to MTC because that is where everyone studies Mandarin, no other options considered.
Chiayi and Pingdong and Nantou are awesome but a bit hard to get around . Like Tainan a lot also.
East coast is great though especially if can see some aboriginal culture.
Just show them a clip of The Oyster that was a pretty good indie film filmed on East coast mostly. If I say something was pretty good it was damn good overall because it captured the feeling of the place very very well.
They opened maybe twenty hotels in that area in the last year.
Really surprised that they are all full. I kept hearing that it was Chinese money building the hotels behind a Taiwanese front company. The reason so many hotels were being built was that there was the influx of Chinese customers and especially to meet the needs of Chinese individual customers. Much of that has died down, so shocked that the hotels are doing good business
A lot of folks were or are staying in airbnbs…I’d rather stay in cheap but nice new hotel than a slightly dodgy airbnb…Now most of those new hotels in Taipei are actually converted offices ,loads of them around Taipei main St pretty cool that the area has improved again.
The area around main station is improving a lot. I used to live there. Loads of cool hotels and B&B’s and cool coffee shops and bars opening. Love the Beimen regeneration, probably the best development in the city for a decade.
Indeed. The cafes are a bit expensive for me on a daily basis but a tourist will find them heavenly and reasonably priced. 200 to 300 ntdd gives you a clean meal -sammich, salad, brunch stuff- and coffee/tea plus any accroutements designed to attarct customers. Think Heritage cafe in several other styles.
Plus you have the traditional cakes and Taiwanese sweets stores moving in too, to get some of that tourist cash. Again, HK and Koreans and others, including the occassional pale face, make up for the lack of Mainlanders aplenty…spending, shopping, eating, drinking higher end stuff. Seems to me a win win: charge more, work less, less hassle.
Asian Economics:
I was in the Philippines once and stayed a beachside hotel. Place was hopping with tourists. It was $10 a night. After 9/11 came back and checked into the same hotel. The owner remember me. The place was empty as tourism dried up after 9/11. But the price was now $15.
I asked the owner why the price jumped 50% - especially given the economic situation. He responded “Now we have fewer customers so we have to charge more.”
So Taiwan hotels may end up doing the same - you never know!