CRI听力: Taiwan to Open to Individual Travelers

Starting in April, people on the Chinese mainland will be allowed to travel to Taiwan without the services of a tour group. The trial program will be available in Beijing and Shanghai and up to 500 people would be permitted to travel to the island each day. As soon as the news came out, many people have called tour agencies to ask for more information.
 
Zhang Wan takes a closer look.




Individual travelers can visit Taiwan for up to 15 days. Applicants are required to earn at least 150,000 yuan or about 22,000 US dollars a year, carry a gold banking card and a property certificate and not have a criminal record.

Currently, mainland passport holders are allowed to travel to Taiwan only in groups, and each group must have more than five and fewer than 40 members.

Hearing that individuals would be allowed to make the tour in April, many people, especially young people, want to take action. Some prospective travelers in a local travel agency say:

"Anyway people in Taiwan speak Chinese, so we can communicate when traveling alone, it's not necessary to travel in a group.

"Traveling by ourselves, we can have more freedom, spend more time on places we are interested in."

Some travel agencies say after Taiwan opens to individual mainland travelers, the sales of current tour products will be influenced.

However, they are not worried. Because there are many qualification requirements for individual applicants, who will be still willing to depend on travel agencies to deal with the precesures. Furthermore, travel agencies can provide better prices for air tickets and hotels.

Hu Zhen, head of a travel agency in Shanghai says they will make some adjustments among their current group tour products after detailed information comes out.

According to some travel agencies, a package deal for a Taiwan tour is around 10,000 yuan or more than 1,500 per person during next month's Spring Festival, when millions of people will travel all over China. The price will be nearly twice the regular price of about 5,000 to 6,000 yuan.

The mainland and Taiwan agreed to raise the number of mainland tourists allowed to enter Taiwan from 3,000 to 4,000 a day, as of January 1, 2011, according to an agreement signed last month.

According to Taiwan official statistics, mainland tourists made over 1.5 million visits to Taiwan from January to November last year, outnumbering tourists from all other countries and areas.

For CRI, I am Zhang Wan.