Individual travel from the mainland to Taiwan will soon be opened on a pilot basis. Taiwan's tourism industry is stepping up preparations

Individual travel from the mainland to Taiwan will soon be open on a trial basis. Taiwan's tourism industry is stepping up preparations. Before the pilot program for mainland tourists to travel to Taiwan for individual travel will be opened, Taiwan's hotel and retail industries are busy...

In Taipei City's Xinyi District, the 101 Building is a must-visit attraction for many mainland tourists. In response to the large number of high-end customers with strong spending power brought by individual travel, Starwood Hotel Group's W Hotel and Le Méridien Hotel opened near the 101 Building at the end of March. Taipei Regent Hotel plans to gradually renovate more than 500 rooms starting from the second half of the year. It also arranged for more than a dozen supervisors to pretend to be ordinary guests and randomly check in two rooms every week to randomly check the service quality.

In the retail industry, Taiwan's two largest supermarket chains, Uni-President Supermarket and FamilyMart, have begun competing for card slots to compete for business opportunities from mainland individual tourists. Uni-President Supermarket took the lead in locating in the Terminal 2 of Taoyuan Airport, and FamilyMart entered the Terminal 2 of Songshan Airport last month. Cosmed, a drugstore chain invested by Uni-President Supermarket, has also installed UnionPay card swiping machines in more than 300 stores across Taiwan. According to statistics, last year, the amount swiped by "Cosmed" UnionPay cards reached nearly NT$100 million, an increase of several times compared with the previous year.