Thirty-nine hotels across Taiwan have stopped accepting guests who need to quarantine due to COVID-19 pandemic rules, as demand has declined after the Lunar New Year holiday, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday.
The demand for quarantine hotel rooms surged after the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) on Dec. 14 last year implemented a special quarantine policy for overseas Taiwanese returning home for the holiday, which ended on Sunday.
They were required to stay in quarantine hotels or government quarantine facilities for seven to 14 days, depending on their COVID-19 vaccination status. The policy is to end on Feb. 28.
Photo: CNA
Bureau statistics showed that 32,000 quarantine hotel rooms were available before the start of the holiday.
By Saturday, the number had dropped to about 30,000, with the occupancy rate shrinking to 37 percent from 50 percent in early December.
Most of the hotels opting out of the quarantine services are in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung, the bureau said.
Of the 2,000 quarantine rooms at those hotels, 800 were only available until Monday last week, it added.
Hotels that offered quarantine services should be disinfected for more than one day before accepting regular guests again, it said.
“Hoteliers make adjustments based on demand, and we respect their decisions,” bureau Deputy Director-General Chou Ting-chang (周廷彰) said.
In other news, Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport was yesterday awarded Airports Council International’s The Voice of the Customer prize, for “listening and adapting to customers during the pandemic.”
The Montreal-based organization last year began recognizing airports valuing input from passengers and recognized the efforts made by Taiwan’s largest airport for a second time in a row.
To receive the recognition, an airport must collect data for three quarters or longer and quickly adapt to changing demands of passengers, the airport operator said.
“Although the pandemic has caused the airport’s passenger volume to drop dramatically, we continue to listen to travelers and have offered facilities that would reduce their risks of contacting COVID-19, such as setting up ultraviolet bacteriostatic cabins to disinfect inbound passengers, adding ultraviolet germicidal lamps to the air-conditioning system in airport terminals and deploying ultraviolet disinfection robots in high-risk areas inside terminals,” it said.
As the International Air Transport Association has forecast that global passenger numbers would in 2024 return to 2019 levels if the pandemic continues to abate, the airport operator said that it would prepare for the expected recovery by enforcing the CECC’s disease prevention measures and ensuring that the planned Terminal 3 and a third runway would be completed as scheduled.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday promised it would increase oversight of use of Chinese in course materials, following a social media outcry over instances of simplified Chinese characters being used, including in a final exam. People on Threads wrote that simplified Chinese characters were used on a final exam and in a textbook for a translation course at the university, while the business card of a professor bore the words: “Taiwan Province, China.” Photographs of the exam, the textbook and the business card were posted with the comments. NKUST said that other members of the faculty did not see
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
The Taipei City Government yesterday said contractors organizing its New Year’s Eve celebrations would be held responsible after a jumbo screen played a Beijing-ran television channel near the event’s end. An image showing China Central Television (CCTV) Channel 3 being displayed was posted on the social media platform Threads, sparking an outcry on the Internet over Beijing’s alleged political infiltration of the municipal government. A Taipei Department of Information and Tourism spokesman said event workers had made a “grave mistake” and that the Television Broadcasts Satellite (TVBS) group had the contract to operate the screens. The city would apply contractual penalties on TVBS
RSS