Kaohsiung officials visit neighboring countries to promote tourism

Kaohsiung tourism officials left Tuesday for Singapore as part of a mission to bring more tourists from Southeast Asia to Taiwan's south.

Kaohsiung Tourism Bureau officials said the bureau's director-general, Chen Sheng-shan, who is heading the Singapore delegation, had just returned from a trip to Malaysia where he met representatives of major Malaysian airlines and the tourism sector to sound out opportunities to set up direct Kaohsiung-Penang air services, the bureau said.

Chen's promotion itinerary will also take him to China in September. The bureau said the city will continue to attract more travelers from China although the number of Chinese tourists visiting the city has been increasing over the past two years.

The bureau said some 500,000 Chinese tourists stayed in hotels in the city in 2009, a number that had increased to 540,000 between January and July this year.

Meanwhile, it went on, the number of Malaysian tourists to Kaohsiung last year nearly doubled compared with that of 2009, while the number of Singaporeans visiting the city last year grew about 40 percent year-on-year.

According to the bureau, Chen will attend the 2011 North China Travel Fair and will meet with tourism sector representatives from Beijing, as well as from the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi and Hebei.

He will promote the city at the upcoming Strait Travel Fair in Tianjing and Xiamen and will visit local tourism businesses and airlines to explore further opportunities for exchanges, the bureau said.

Bureau official Hung Chi-chang noted that there are more tourist destinations in the city now that Kaohsiung city and county have been merged into a special municipality.

Hung added that the convenient transport afforded by the city's mass rapid transit system is another incentive for travelers to visit the city.

Source - http://focustaiwan.tw