Overseas travel business battered by flu pandemic

(ChinaPost.com.tw) – Taiwan’s travel agencies, who still have not recovered from the global financial storm, have been left reeling even further with the World Health Organization’s declaration of a global pandemic of the A(H1N1) influenza virus, which has frightened many local people into avoiding foreign travel.

According to the latest Tourism Bureau statistics, only a few first-stop overseas destinations such as South Korea, Britain, Palau and Australia, enjoyed growth in the number of travelers from Taiwan in May thanks to the incentives that included favorable exchange rates, visa-free privileges and convenient flight services.

The number of Taiwanese travelers to Japan, which attracts over 1 million Taiwanese visitors each year, had only 80,382 visits by this group in May, marking a drop of 35.41 percent from the same month of the previous year, the statistics show.

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