<aside> 🇹🇼 This is part 2 of the series on moving to Taiwan:
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You got your Gold Card. Now what?
When you arrive in Taiwan, you'll need to quarantine for 15 days. Sometimes it's described as a 14-day quarantine, but the quarantine begins the day after you land so it's technically 15 days: For example, I landed on the evening of 11/22 (Sunday), and I can leave my hotel anytime on 12/7 (Monday).
Assuming you don't have family in Taiwan (if you do, make sure you have your own bedroom and bathroom), you'll need to find accommodations. People used to be able to quarantine in short-term rental units like Airbnbs, but as of September, the Tapiei City Government is requiring everyone to stay in quarantine hotels.
Here's the full list of quarantine hotels maintained by them.
When you start going through that list, you'll realize three things:
If you're used to spending $20 to stay in dope hostels when travling, paying $50+ a night for a tiny hotel room isn't going to sound that appealing. Unfortunately, you don't have a choice if you want to move here. (Yay, seller's market.) My recommendation is to start looking as soon as possible to get a good deal so that you're not left choosing between hotels that all charge $100+ per night.
For reference, the cheapest hotel on that list is a hostel that charges NT$1000 ($35 USD) a night, but that price is only for Taiwanese citizens and permanent residents. For foreigners (if you're a Gold Card holder, that's you), that same room is NT$1800 ($63 USD) a night. (Yay, price discrimination.) The cheapest price that I found for foreigners is NT$1500 ($53 USD), so you should expect to pay at least that much.
So how do you navigate the website to find the cheapest rooms? Unfortunately, there's no way to filter or sort the results. What I did was manually search the start of prices (e.g. "1,0" for 1,000, "1,1" for 1,100) to match the ranges listed in the descriptions, click on the spreadsheet, check availability, write down the price for foreigners (the price in the description is for locals), go back, and repeat until I had a handful of hotels to reach out to.
That's not a fun process, but there didn't seem to be a better way. That is, until I started writing this post and decided to do you all a solid. Thanks to Browserflow, the browser automation platform I've been obsessively working on for the last 6 months, I was able to automate the process of clicking on every single one of those spreadsheets and getting the foreigner price.
<aside> ⭐ I present to you: Taipei quarantine hotels sorted by price
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Wow, am I the best or what. (I really should've done this before I came to Taiwan because there are some sweet deals that I didn't see before.)
One more thing about the price: The listed price is usually inclusive of 3-4 meal a day. If you arrange your own meals, the daily rate will be reduced.
Once you've identified a few hotels, start reaching out to them with inquiries for your specific dates.