Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau has rolled out tour bus services providing free Wi-Fi. According to Weite Lu, the chairman of Taiwan Tour Bus Association, Taiwan is the first country in the world to offer free Wi-Fi services on its tour buses.
Lu said that Taiwan launched a government-sponsored tour bus service later than Japan and Hong Kong. However, Lu said that Taiwan is now playing a leading role in terms of smart tours, with features including multilingual audio guides.
Lu explains Taiwan’s role in the developing smart tourism.
“We were late in Asia to provide tour bus services. But we are ahead of the rest of the world in this area," said Lu.
"Earlier this year, we introduced smart audio guides available in Mandarin, English, Japanese, and Korean. And now, we offer free Wi-Fi on tour buses on the 106 routes run by 26 travel agencies. I think this is a significant stride we made in terms of the global travel industry.”
The Taiwan Tour Bus service has served 1.85 million passsengers since its launch in 2004. Over 60% of users are travelers from abroad. The Tourism Bureau encourages travelers to use the free Wi-Fi to check-in on Facebook and share the food and scenery of Taiwan with friends overseas.