Tourism Bureau Actively Guides Travel Industry Transformation and Source Expansion, Seven Major Elements Inject Strong Momentum

The Tourism Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications carried out the 2018 program to effectively guide the overall travel industry in transformation and upgrading, enhance capacity to serve emerging markets and optimize service quality. As of December 15, 2017, it had completed 7 training courses, 7 industry matchmaking meetings and 8 in-depth familiarization itineraries under the travel industry transformation guidance program, with a cumulative 1,006 tourism-related businesses and 1,147 participants, and created as many as 31 types of tourism industry clusters, the highest number of participants for this type of activity program in recent years. According to follow-up tracking of 225 travel businesses that participated in the activities, as many as 90% of respondents said they had begun introducing new business methods, while nearly 85% of respondents said they had begun developing new customer sources, showing that this program's activities have a diffusion effect and have already brought diverse changes and source-expansion benefits to travel businesses.

This was the second year the Tourism Bureau held the travel industry transformation and source expansion guidance program. Unlike the first year, which targeted mainland China tour travel agencies, this time it mainly provided guidance to travel businesses operating under traditional business models, hoping to pull them toward new types of services, learn online business knowledge, and transform from traditional cursory sightseeing itineraries into deepened local characteristic experience itineraries. Therefore, before holding the main activities, it specially arranged for businesses to study new-concept courses on innovative products, Muslim services and online marketing, hoping to introduce new concepts for businesses to transform, use "new thinking" to create felt marketing that connects with customers' hearts, develop "new markets" through the southward push, and use "new tools" of the internet to develop new customer sources.

The Tourism Bureau stated that "diversified layout" has always been the bureau's policy, and emphasized improving businesses' risk control capabilities. At the current stage, the government's tourism policy gives priority to global layout and quality optimization, advancing tourism under the principles of "innovation" and "sustainability" with both quality and quantity. In the future, in addition to continuing to guide the branded development of the travel industry, improve the operational constitution of the travel industry, assist the industry in e-commerce transformation and create competitiveness, the Tourism Bureau also hopes that government departments and travel businesses will jointly inject strong momentum into tourism development with the seven major elements of new momentum, new attractions, new elements, new products, new technologies, new customer groups and new economy, and together build Taiwan, China into a "friendly, smart, experiential" important tourism destination in Asia.