Implications of outbound Chinese tourism - A perspective from Taiwan's tourism industries

Taiwan’s tourism has slowly been increasing over the years, which manifested itself in the higher numbers of tourist arrivals on the island. As in 2008 the tourism authorities’ objective to double the incoming tourist arrivals in the wake of its 21st century strategy to develop tourism as a major industry had not been met, Taiwan’s new government opened up to Chinese tourism. With almost annual increases in Chinese daily limits, mainland tourists rapidly became the major source of inbound tourism to Taiwan, and consequently also of additional income to the economy. Despite these benefits however, Taiwan’s tourism capacities have been stated to show difficulties in accommodating this new massive increase in tourists, which has been stated by the media to have led to a decrease of Taiwan’s tourism quality. At the lack of a comprehensive study on the implications of Chinese tourism to Taiwan, this thesis thus contributes to the current state of research through the analysis of Chinese visitors’ positive and negative effects in terms of the 9 different tourism industries of transportation, accommodation, food service, attractions, travel services, retail, health sector, agriculture and cultural and creative industries in Taiwan as defined within this thesis. In a second part, a consumer behavior analysis on secondary data and expert interviews have been conducted as quantitative and qualitative support of the findings. As a secondary objective, this study tries to derive some policy recommendations on how to improve the overall quality of Taiwan’s tourism environment, and attract more international tourists to the island