Taiwanesisk turistkontor har öppnat i Peking

PRESS RELEASE

Government Information Office, Taiwan
May 12, 2010

Taiwan Strait Tourism Association opens office in Beijing

The Taiwan Strait Tourism Association (TSTA) opened its Beijing office with an inaugural ceremony on May 4. Janice Lai, head of the TSTA and director-general of the Tourism Bureau under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, noted that the office represented a major step in resuming tourism exchanges after 60 years of separate rule across the strait. The establishment of the Beijing office, says Lai, will mark a new milestone leading to closer bilateral tourism exchanges.

According to the Tourism Bureau, the TSTA’s office in Beijing will be charged with three major tasks:

Separately, to promote cross-strait tourism, the Taipei Association of Travel Agents held a Taiwan-mainland exhibition as part of its four-day Taipei Tourism Exposition at the Taipei World Trade Center starting April 30. Delegations of travel agents from 18 mainland Chinese provinces and cities, including Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang, set up nearly 100 display booths at the expo. In his address to the opening ceremony, Wu Chao-yen, deputy director-general of the Tourism Bureau, said that cross-strait tourism exchange has gone from non-existent to its current state, from unidirectional to bidirectional, gradually picking up momentum and opening up step by step to achieve excellent progress. While moving steadily in a healthy and positive direction, the tourism industries on both sides are working toward enhancing travel quality.

On June 13, 2008, Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation and the mainland’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait signed the Cross-Strait Agreement Concerning Mainland Tourists Traveling to Taiwan. Then, on July 4, the Cross-Strait Tourism Exchange Association (CSTEA) led its first group—of 644 mainland travelers—to Taiwan, thus opening a new era in cross-strait tourism exchange. Group tourists from mainland China have since increased from an initial daily average of 200-300 visitors to 3,200 in the first four months of 2010, bringing the total of mainland travelers to Taiwan to over 1.6 million since these tourism exchanges were liberalized.

Lai said that as the number of mainland tourists increased, efforts have been made to enhance services to both the industry and travelers. On October 20, 2009, the bureau—under the name of the TSTA—and the mainland’s CSTEA applied to set up reciprocal offices on opposite sides of the strait. The formal establishment of the TSTA’s Beijing office is aimed at providing a more friendly service platform from a closer proximity while emphasizing both quantity and quality in developing the mainland tourism market for Taiwan.

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