Tainan Travel

Tainan City government initiated collaboration with the world's largest hotel booking site, Booking.com. The city’s Mayor Huang Wei-che and Booking.com VP & Managing Director APAC Angel Llull Mancas signed an MOU at Tainan City Government Yonghua Civic Center on March 15. This MOU pledged that the collaboration contract will be completed soon, and both parties will launch projects to connect tourism platforms on both sides. The collaboration is expected to effectively attract international visitors to Tainan and stimulate tourism business opportunities in the city.

Mayor Huang remarked that Tainan City has been working hard on rolling out blue ocean strategies for local tourism. While encouraging Taiwanese citizens to visit Tainan is important, it is also crucial to expand the tourism market and attract more international tourists. Huang pointed out that Booking.com has long been the leading hotel booking portal brand and has the largest backpacker and business traveler user base; therefore Tainan City government actively sought collaboration opportunities with the company. After eight to nine months of interactions and discussions, both parties finally reached primary consensus and agreed to work together.

By signing this MOU, the Mayor aims to provide better services to travelers in Tainan, and also hopes that more Booking.com users can learn about Tainan and Taiwan through the platform. Furthermore, Huang believes that by working with a global company such as Booking.com, accommodation and travel industries in Tainan can better understand the needs of international travelers. And this will consequently improve Tainan's tourism marketing strategies and help them achieve better and more comprehensive results. 
Following the signing of the MOU, cooperation efforts are expected to start immediately. In recent years, more and more people choose to plan their own itineraries, and doing research for their itineraries and booking trips via online travel agencies (OTA) has become the main trend. Therefore, the Tainan Pass website , set up by Tainan City Government Tourism Bureau, will be connected to the hotel room listing and booking systems from Booking.com so that domestic and international travelers can reserve and book everything they need for their trip on one site: restaurants, accommodations, transportation, and specialty goods. Booking.com VP Mr. Mancas also expressed his hope that this MOU can boost Tainan's digital tourism economy, increase Tainan's international visibility, and attract more international visitors to Tainan.

Booking.com is currently the world's largest OTA. The site has a hotel room listing of 28 million rooms which covers over 220 countries, and processes 1,550,000 nights of bookings every day. Offering its services in 43 languages, Booking.com has accumulated 160 million traveler reviews and is, at the moment, the OTA with the largest scope of services offered, and the largest number of hotel room listings and transaction volume. The site also provides the most comprehensive services in different languages and has accumulated the most reviews. According to the Tainan City Government Tourism Bureau, by connecting hotel room listing and booking systems from Booking.com with the Tainan Pass platform, Tainan will be linked with travelers around the world who are planning their itineraries, and the city will be able to welcome visitors and travelers from anywhere at any time. In the future, the city government will continue to seek more collaboration opportunities, develop more cross-platform cooperations, and attract more domestic and international visitors to Tainan.