Tourism | Group visitors up in August

Visitors on package tours totalled 785,000 in August 2018, up by 12.4 percent year- on-year and 3.3 percent month-to-month. According to information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), package tour visitors from mainland China (611,000) rose by 6.8 percent year- on-year, and those from the Republic of Korea (56,000) and Taiwan (63,000) surged by 66.5 percent and 91.1 percent respectively. In the first eight months of 2018, visitors on package tours totalled 5,813,000, up by 10.7 percent year-on- year.

According to DSEC, there were 116 hotels and guesthouses operating at the end of August 2018, an increase of 9 year-on- year. The number of hotels and guesthouses guests in August 2018 rose by 16.8 percent year-on-year to 1,279,000. Guests coming from mainland China (912,000), Hong Kong (140,000) and Taiwan (42,000) increased by 25.4 percent, 1.4 percent and 7 percent respectively. The average occupancy rate of hotels and guesthouses registered a record high of 93.3 percent since the survey results were first released, a growth of 6.5 percentage points year-on-year.

Outbound residents
using the services of travel agencies increased by 20 percent year-on- year to 141,000. But the number of residents travelling on package tours decreased by 8.1 percent to 44,000, with those going to mainland China rising by 10.2 percent to 31,000. However, residents travelling to the Republic of Korea (18,000) tumbled by 66.6 percent year-on-year. In the first eight months of 2018, outbound residents using the services of travel agencies totalled 1,036,000, up by 13.7 percent year-on-year.