Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau should work with influencers over agencies.

The News Lens
Date: 2018/04/24
By: Stephanie ZY Hsu

Credit: Taiwan Tourism Board

The Taiwan Tourism Bureau’s (TTB) most recent scandal began, as so many modern implosions do, with Twitter beef. Kathy Cheng, who runs Taipei-centric blog Tricky Taipei, wrote a post about her run-in with the enigmatic, spellcheck-deprived forces behind the horrendous @TripToTaiwan account.

The Twitter account is officially linked to the TTB; marking a new low in the bureau’s history of amateur, incoherent and disjointed promotional initiatives. The posts championing Taiwanese “wishky” and “dirty chocolate bread” were quickly scrubbed from the @TripToTaiwan account, but not before the story was shared by a variety of outlets: Apple Daily, network television (TTV), and even the Facebook pages of media personalities.

Though I had not previously known about the existence of the @TripToTaiwan Twitter, the TTB’s complicity in its cringe-worthy content hardly surprised me. In February of this year, I had two meetings with the TTB, including a lengthy sit-down with the International Affairs Division Director Cheng Ying-huei (鄭瑛惠), and its Section Chief, Joseph Cheng (國際組).
[FULL  STORY]