More mainland tourists are expected to visit Taiwan during the upcoming one-week National Day holiday starting Oct 1, giving a boost to the island's tourism, which has not had as many individual mainland tourists as expected.
Ctrip.com, one of China's leading online travel services, said in a news release that the number of individual tourists to the island is expected to double during the Golden Week holiday.
The company also estimates that visitors from the mainland will significantly increase in the fourth quarter, which is normally regarded as the best season to travel to the island.
In late June, a pilot tourism program was agreed by both sides of the Straits, which allowed mainland tourists to visit the island as individuals rather than in tour groups, although the number is capped at 500 a day.
However, mainland tourists have so far been less enthusiastic than expected.
Statistics from the Taiwan Strait Tourism Association show that in the first month after the new policy took effect, only 633 individual tourists visited Taiwan.
"Business in the past two months has not been as good as we expected," said Huang Te-chen, general manger of China Travel Services, a Taiwan travel agency. "More than half of the individual visitors from the mainland were not really here for sightseeing but visiting relatives or friends."
Fan Liqing, a spokeswoman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, said on Wednesday that there are several reasons for the lukewarm market.
The new tourism policy still needs time to influence the market and authorities are trying to simplify the application process for individuals, which many consider too complicated, Fan said.
But group visits to the island have remained very popular.
According to the office, 770,000 mainland tourists visited Taiwan in tour groups in the first eight months of this year, and in August alone, 90,600 tourists made group trips, up 17.6 percent from last year.
Last year, 1.66 million tourists from the mainland visited Taiwan.
Questions:
1. What is the Golden Week holiday?
2. What is projected for Taiwan?
3. How many people are allowed to visit Taiwan from the mainland?
Answers:
1. One-week National Day holiday starting Oct 1.
2. More mainland tourists are expected to visit. The number of individual tourists to the island is expected to double during that week.
3. Individual visitors are capped at 500 a day.
來源：中國日報網英語點津 編輯：許銀娟