The government will continue to promote cross-Straits tourism in 2012, Wang Zhifa, deputy director of the National Tourism Administration, said on Friday.

About 1.79 million tourists from the Chinese mainland visited Taiwan in 2011, 1.25 million of them on package tours, Wang said.

Visitors on package tours stayed an average of 6.5 days on the island and spent an average of $260 a day, Wang said. He estimated that $5 billion has been spent on Taiwan since July 18, 2008, when the island was opened to tourists from the mainland.

Under a trial program that went into effect June 28, 2011, residents of Beijing, Shanghai, and Xiamen are allowed to make individual trips to Taiwan. China plans to add eight to ten more cities to the list in 2012, Wang said.

As cross-Straits tourism becomes more popular, quality needs to be stressed as well as quantity, said Wang.

"We should learn lessons from Sanya's experience," he said. "During the Spring Festival holidays, about 480,000 tourists, more than double the number of permanent residents, flooded into Sanya. It was chaos. We must make sure this won't happen in Taiwan."