Passenger haul from Taiwan dips 29%
There may be a need for the CNMI government to intensify its promotional efforts in Taiwan after Mandarin Airlines disclosed yet another discouraging statistics on tourist arrivals from Taipei in November.
In an interview, Mandarin Air Saipan station manager Charlie Ling said the carrier’s overall passenger load on its Saipan-Taipei route shrunk two percent from 63 percent in October to 61 percent last month.
This translates to 665 passengers arriving from Taiwan to the Northern Marianas via Mandarin Airlines for the whole month of November, down by 29 percent from October’s 936 passengers, said Mr. Ling.
He blamed the dramatic decline in visitor arrivals from Taipei to the economic slowdown in Taiwan, indicated by the current situation in the country’s stock market which fell by as much as 50 percent since middle of the year.
“Most of our travelers hold stocks and the downturn in the market has somehow affected their spending,” he said, adding that overseas trips are most of the time the first to suffer the ax when the need to tighten the budget arises.
Taiwanese stock investors who now face significant losses in their bourse investments due to economic slowdown comprise a big slice of Mandarin Air’s passengers, according to the airline executive.
Mr. Ling pointed out that the drop was not confined to Saipan-bound travelers but to all routes served by Mandarin Air in major tour destinations in Asian countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines.
He also attributed the significant drop in Mandarin Air’s passenger haul last month to the termination of the charter agreement with Tinian Dynasty Hotel and Casino last Nov. 17.
He added that Mandarin Air, prior to the termination of the charter agreement with Tinian Dynasty, has been ferrying two kinds of passengers from Taiwan — casino players and plain tourists.
The airline executive lamented that since Tinian Dynasty stopped chartering flights from Taiwan, casino players flying to the Northern Marianas from Taipei have been virtually eliminated from the carrier’s target market.
In October, Mandarin Airlines dispatched aircraft that were only about 63 percent loaded with passengers, representing a 12 percent fall from the 75 percent load factor recorded in September. Overall passenger traffic from Taipei dropped 10 percent to 936 from 1,034.
Mandarin Airlines’ witnessed a major drop in load factor beginning August when its passenger haul plunged four percent to 87 percent from 91 percent in July. The carrier’s load factor also registered a 12 percent drop to 75 percent between August and September.
Travelers from Taiwan have slowly made themselves known as the next most important market for the CNMI tourism industry as the Taipei-based carrier reported that it has exceeded the 80 percent load factor target in the first four months of its flight services to the island.
The carrier reported the highest load factor in July that reached 91 percent. Mandarin Air has scheduled to deploy 69 flights until the end of the year.
With the beginning of direct air service between Taipei and Saipan, Commonwealth officials are expecting to get a good share of over five million Taiwanese who take overseas travels once every year. The island-nation, which is home to over 22 million people, has one of the best standards of living in the world.
