Taiwan Gave Me NT$5,000 for My Trip - Twice

Nothing makes me happier before a trip than finding out I won free stuff from the country I was already planning to visit.

There are a lot of these things floating around online if you happen to see them: airline promos, tourism board giveaways, hotel vouchers, random campaigns shared in Facebook groups. Most of the time I register, forget about them, and never hear anything again.

In 2024, I saw a post in one of the Taiwan travel groups I follow on Facebook about a Taiwan Tourism Administration × Klook promotion. I registered without thinking much about it because I already had another trip to Taiwan coming up. Then, in October, I got an email saying I had won an NT$5,000 travel prize. Imagine my surprise?!

I used it as an accommodation voucher at Hub Hotel Zhongshan for my November trip. It didn’t cover the whole stay. The hotel was around ₱12,000 - ₱15,000, so I still paid the difference, but I was going to book a hotel anyway, so I was very happy to take the discount. I ended up liking the hotel too: good neighborhood, free breakfast, coffee, and ice cream.

Taipei Fine Arts Museum was only a few minutes away, so I had lunch at ACME nearby, had pesto pasta and coffee, then went through the museum before heading back to the hotel to work and sleep. It was just one of those Taipei days where I had one thing I wanted to do and spent the rest of the time taking it easy.

In March 2025, I entered another Taiwan promotion and somehow won another NT$5,000. I booked Hub Hotel Zhongshan again because I already knew I liked it there. Before heading to Sun Moon Lake, I went to Xinyi hoping to visit Fubon Art Museum, but they had a private event, so I just walked around instead. Later, I worked from the hotel for a few hours and wandered around Zhongshan.

Anyway, Taiwan ended up helping pay for the same hotel twice.

Since then, I’ve paid a little more attention to random travel promos I come across online. Most of them probably won’t lead to anything, but sometimes you get lucky.

Taiwan also has another repeat-visitor promotion opening in October 2026, so I’ll probably register for that one too, haha. At this point, I’m mostly curious whether I can somehow get lucky a third time.

Maybe this is part of why I love Taiwan. I already kept finding reasons to go back, and somehow it kept giving me a few extra ones.