The Lunar New Year holiday begins the day after tomorrow, and Pingtung’s Kenting, which has always sparked a rush for Spring Festival accommodations and is an important indicator of domestic tourism, currently has an overall booking rate of about 60% for the 7-day period. In previous years, the first to third days of the Lunar New Year were always fully booked, but this year the average booking rate is only 80%.
Xiaoliuqiu is faring even worse, with the booking rate for the first to third days of the Lunar New Year plummeting to just over 30%. Operators directly point to this as an unprecedented “cold winter” for tourism in recent years. The main reasons analyzed are the post-pandemic surge in overseas travel, coupled with the highest room rates during the Spring Festival and a shift in holiday travel preferences towards urban hotels.
According to statistics from the Pingtung County Tourism Department, this year’s peak period for Spring Festival accommodations fell on the first to third days of the Lunar New Year. Resorts including the Kenting Howard Plaza Hotel had a booking rate of about 80%, with some even as low as 60% to 70%, a stark contrast to the situation before the pandemic when accommodations would be fully booked two months in advance. Even on New Year’s Eve, it was hard to find a room, with booking rates for other holiday periods varying from 30% to 60%, and similar rates for B&Bs. Kenting’s core area B&Bs fared slightly better, with an average rate of less than 50%. Operators describe this as a rare “cold winter” for tourism outside of pandemic times, with Xiaoliuqiu faring even worse.
“It’s getting worse, but we didn’t expect it to be this bad!” said a manager at a five-star hotel in Kenting. After the pandemic was declared over last year, the increase in overseas travel led to a noticeable decline in tourists to Kenting, with a 40% decrease during the summer peak season. There was a bad feeling about this year’s Lunar New Year, and indeed, the normally highly competitive period from New Year’s Eve to the third day of the New Year saw only a 50% booking rate for New Year’s Eve and just 80% for the first to third days. The industry’s inquiries among each other all received negative responses. The chairman of the Xiaoliuqiu Tourism Development Association, Xu Bohan, said they knew it would be bad, but the Spring Festival bookings were so dismal that everyone was in disbelief.
Kenting’s accommodation operators analyzed the reasons, with the main one being the post-pandemic surge in overseas travel. The Spring Festival holiday is a peak period for going abroad, another reason being that room rates in Kenting during the Spring Festival are the highest of the year, usually only 30% to 40% of the Spring Festival rates, plus recent increases in material costs, making it impossible to lower consumer spending in tourist areas. Some tourists chose relatively lower-priced urban hotels, and the number of international tourists coming to Kenting has also shrunk compared to the past. Various factors have led to a decline in accommodation bookings in Kenting for this year’s Lunar New Year holiday.
According to statistics on visitor numbers to various recreation areas in Kenting National Park, the Kenting area saw over 2.62 million visitors in 2023, an increase of less than 100,000 compared to the 2.53 million visitors in 2022, which was still affected by the pandemic, and nearly half the 4 million visitors before the pandemic in 2019, even less than the 2.63 million visitors in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020. Accommodation operators said that international tourists are temporarily very few, and fully opening up to tourists from mainland China to visit Taiwan would be a solution, but given the current political situation, there is not much hope.
Graph illustrating the visitor numbers in the Kenting area from 2019 to 2023. As depicted, there’s a significant drop in visitors post-2019, with a slight recovery in 2023, but not reaching the pre-pandemic levels.
The Pingtung County Department of Transportation and Tourism said that after the borders were fully opened, the enthusiasm for overseas travel caused the domestic tourism market to be squeezed out. In addition to continuing to hold annual events, the county government also actively participates in domestic and international travel fairs and organizes promotional events abroad, such as in Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc., inviting foreign influencers to visit and promote the fame of Pingtung (and completely ignoring my work on this resource, that I do completely free of charge, out of the wish to help Kenting).
To attract international tourists to visit Pingtung after entering Taiwan, the “Promotion Plan for International Visitors to Pingtung” is also being actively pursued, not ruling out the possibility of offering related incentives to attract customers in collaboration with operators and planning new attractions and strengthening service facilities to improve quality and attract customers.