The number of domestic travelers during the Lunar New Year holiday this year will drop 20 percent for inbound tours and by as much as 40 percent for outbound tours year-on-year as a result of a shorter vacation and a sluggish economy, a local travel agent said.
"Since the Lunar New Year vacation only lasts six days, four to five-day tours to Japan and Southeast Asia, which cost between NT$30,000 and NT$40,000, are the most popular overseas destinations," Allen Lin (
HEADING SOUTH
For domestic tours, last year saw an equal number of travelers heading for central and southern Taiwan, but this year, Lin said that 90 percent of his domestic customers planned to spend their vacation in Southern Taiwan.
"People traveling to Central Taiwan this year will drive there, as they only book hotels through travel agencies. The sluggish economy has prompted customers to seek ways to cut on costs," Lin said.
The Taiwan High Speed Rail, launched on Jan. 5 last year, is also a convenient way to travel south, Lin said.
"Chiayi and Tainan have replaced Hualien as the most popular domestic destination for the Lunar New Year holiday, as a lot of people want to experience the [high speed] rail," Lin said.
Compared with last year, hotel room and high-speed rail prices this year are slightly higher.
On average, a three-day domestic package tour using the high speed rail this year will cost about NT$19,000, he said, to last year's NT$18,000.
Expenses for outbound travel, meanwhile, did not increase much this year, Lin said.
CHINA
Following the heavy snowstorms that have paralyzed some parts of China, the Taiwanese government has required that domestic travel agencies assist tourists who cannot travel there to find other destinations if they do not want a refund.
"Customers who had initially planned to travel to the affected areas in China, for which they paid between NT$25,000 and NT$30,000, can now travel to the more expensive Hokkaido, Japan, for an additional NT$1,000 to NT$2,000," Peter Tsao (曹家維), junior vice president of marketing at the Taipei-based Signet Travel Co (新台旅行社), said in a telephone interview yesterday.
"Those trips would normally have cost NT$40,000," he said.
"It is a win-win situation for us and our customers, as they get to travel to Hokkaido for much less money than usual, while we book seats on our charter flights," Tsao said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS