Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in Taiwan Essay -- Health, Diseases

In March 2003, the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), so far the most lethal infectious disease in this century, hit the world, including Taiwan. The unfortunate pandemic shattered Taiwan’s tourism industry and the nation’s image of a safe tourism destination region, thus affecting Taiwan’s economy. The Taiwanese government, as well as others that were affected, placed restrictions of varying stringency on domestic and international travel due to the cases of SARS. Therefore, precautions were taken and Taiwan’s global travel and tourism system deteriorated. Having Japan and Hong Kong as Taiwan’s two main sources of tourist arrivals, this pandemic decreased a huge amount of international arrivals from these generating regions reaching a level the island had never before witnessed. Accordingly, due to the influence of SARS on tourism from Japan and Hong Kong, Taiwan had to re-establish its image as one of Asia’s must-see dest inations. Undertaking such research in this pandemic will give a further insight into the impacts of SARS and how the tourism industry has responded in relation to the turmoil that transpired in one of the worst affected in the Asian region, Taiwan. The importance of this research relies vastly on the perceptions from various stakeholders that were affected by the disease, including the community, business owners and the nation as a whole. The impacts of such a turbulent disease ranged from escalating health warnings and death tolls, to economic problems including the deterioration of businesses and sales which led to loss of jobs and furthermore, the large decline in inbound tourist arrivals primarily from Japan and Hong Kong (Pine and McKercher, 2004). Due to the large scale of impacts... ...’s concern about SARS. Secondly, advertising and promotional campaign took place to boost willingness to travel to Taiwan. In order to obtain the numbers of Japanese tourists during pre-SARS, the Taiwan government implemented on advertisements with the aim of giving Taiwan the image of being one of Asia’s must-see destinations for tourists. With the aid of these initiatives, Taiwan’s tourism market had restored to normal by the summer holiday season. While arrivals from Japan recovered to only 70% of pre-SARS level due to a drop off in international trips by Japanese travellers in general, growth was seen in all the other major source markets, including Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, and the U.S. The Japanese tourist arrivals did not recover completely until more than a year after Taiwan was officially removed the list of SARS affected areas (Mao, Ding, Le 2004).