Information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that visitors on package tours totalled 629,000, up by 11.7% year-on-year and 14.5% month-to-month. Package tour visitors from Mainland China (486,000), the Republic of Korea (39,000) and Taiwan (36,000) went up by 9.9%, 65.4% and 11.2% respectively year-on-year. In the first quarter of 2017, visitors on package tours totalled 1,711,000, up slightly by 0.6% year-on-year.
Outbound residents using services of travel agencies decreased slightly by 0.9% year-on-year to 106,000. Residents travelling on package tours dropped by 5.1% to 43,000; those going to Mainland China (30,000) went down by 4.8%, while those travelling to the Republic of Korea (5,400) rose by 10.0%. In the first quarter of 2017, outbound residents using services of travel agencies totalled 333,000, up by 6.4% year-on-year.
There were 108 hotels & guesthouses operating at the end of March 2017. Number of guest rooms increased by 13.1% year-on-year to 36,000, of which 5-star hotel rooms (22,000) took up 60.2%.
A total of 1,056,000 guests checked into hotels & guesthouses in March 2017, up by 17.3% year-on-year. Guests from Mainland China (701,000), the Republic of Korea (37,000) and Taiwan (37,000) went up by 24.8%, 73.6% and 27.9% respectively, while those from Hong Kong (130,000) decreased by 11.4%. The average length of stay of guests held stable as in March 2016 at 1.4 nights. The average occupancy rate of hotels & guesthouses stood at 82.7%, up by 5.5 percentage points year-on-year; 4-star hotels took the lead at 87.9%, up by 8.0 percentage points, while the rates of 5-star (82.3%) and 3-star hotels (80.6%) went up by 4.9 and 0.9 percentage points respectively.
In the first quarter of 2017, guests of hotels & guesthouses totalled 3,047,000, up by 13.7% year-on-year. The average occupancy rate of hotels & guesthouses increased by 5.2 percentage points to 83.0%, while the average length of stay of guests remained unchanged at 1.4 nights. Visitor-guests accounted for 73.0% of the total overnight visitors, up by 1.2 percentage points year-on-year.