Tourism industry in Kenting is bracing for the impact of the latest wave of pandemic cases in Taiwan.
Room reservation rate according to this article from SETN, room reservation rate is only 10% from the normal rate that was present during normal times. This is not the particularly problem of Kenting hotels, average accommodation rate in the whole Taiwan has fallen below the 50% of the normal rate, but Kenting is hit especially hard, because this is usually a crowded place, with beaches and usually bustling Kenting Nightmarket, so naturally many people decided to cancel the trip.
This years Dragon Boat Festival also will be less quiet than usually, currently more than 70% of the bookings are made for Kenting, however, usually cancellations come in last moment, so this number could fall down even more early June of 2022.
Visitors to Houbihu Marina Seafood Street are half of what they used to be.
Houbihu Marina with it’s incredibly popular Seafood Street, which is a must-go on almost every local Taiwan visitors Kenting Itinerary (and for a reason – it is really great), is having a half of the visitors of the usual flow they experienced before.
As one of the restaurant owners told to SETN.com reporter:
– We still have a lot of vacancies, there are still many seats, no need to wait at all for a table!
Empty tables in Houbihu Marina Sea Food street
I remember eating several times in this very restaurant that is shown in above photo – it was almost impossible to not have await time during a regular lunch and dinner times, we usually came in at odd times, such as 4 p.m to have a chance for a table. This place are especially famous for their pineapple-shrimps, and Lovers-Tear Mushrooms.
However, if Houbihu seafood street owners have seen cut of visitors to half, it’s small homestays that suffer the most in the whole Pingtung area.
Lin Shumin (林淑敏), Chairman of Pingtung Homestay Association Says: “Usually now booking rate is only 10% of what it was before, because epidemic is heating up”
Asked about room cancellation rate, she says that it does not makes sense to talk about this, since the room booking rate is already so low.
Not only small homestays and B&B’s are affected, but also big resorts, that usually had no problems to get a new customer, are starting to feel the pressure.
Qiu Xianshun 邱顯順 – Vice President of Chateau Beach Resort in Kenting
Qiu Xianshun 邱顯順 – Vice President of Chateau Beach Resort in Kenting, said to setn.com: “Our current room occupation rate is only about 40%, however, booking rates for the first and second days of Dragon Boat Festival Holidays exceeded 70%, but third day, only 50%, group trips has been postponed.
I especially highlighted the text, where Mr Qiu talks about groups – if you are familiar with Kenting Tourism landscape, then you will probably know that, these group tours, were Crème de la crème, for the larger hotels, such as Chateau – they typically did not stay in smaller homestays in B&B’s, and this seem to be a second hit for these big resorts, after the big tourist groups from Mainland China stopped come to Taiwan several years ago.
At the time of writing this post, 5/27/2022 12:14 PM, there are still plenty of room at 2 main beach resorts in Kenting – Chateau Beach Resort and Caesar Park Hotel Kenting.
Such situation would be unimaginable in normal times, those hotels are hard to book in summer, not talking about large holidays, like Dragon Boat Festival.
This also explains, why some hotels, are now offering really low prices, such as Dajianshan hotel, which you can book as low as 23 USD per room, which we found during our last Kenting Hotel Price study for September 2022.