Taiwan is courting Filipino business travelers to consider the country as an overseas destination for meetings, incentive travel, conferences and exhibitions (MICE).
This is the aim of the Bureau of Foreign Trade in Taiwan, which recently held the Meet Taiwan networking meeting in Manila.
Taiwanese MICE industry players, such as travel agencies, hotels and conference/exhibition companies, met with local counterparts on Tuesday.
Lily Super, executive director of Meet Taiwan, estimates 170,000 Filipino tourists visited the Republic of China/Taiwan last year. This is a significant growth from 2015’s 140,000 visitors.
With the growing tourist numbers, Super hopes to entice business tourists, corporate buyers and travel trade executives.
Taiwan’s Bureau of Foreign Trade has focused on its Southbound Policy, targeting Asian countries, like Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia, that can serve as alternative tourism sources to China.
“We want to build closer relations with other countries due to these policies,” added Rosa Liu, manager for Convention Section III at the Taiwan External Trade Development Council.
Mainland China currently takes up the lion’s share of Taiwan’s inbound tourists, but numbers have stagnated as of late, Super said, thus the need to look at other markets.