Day 326: Preparing for Your Move to Taiwan
You got your Gold Card. Now what?
Finding a Quarantine Hotel
Hotels vs. Airbnbs
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.
Cost
When you start going through that list, you’ll realize three things:
- Quarantine hotels are relatively pricey
- Many hotels are fully booked
- The website is too minimal
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.
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.
My Hotel
I’m currently staying in a hotel called Lane to Life. After reaching out over email and confirming their availability, we moved our communication over to LINE where I filled out a registration form. I decided to arrange my own meals, which dropped the price of their standard double room from NT$2,300 (~$80 USD) a night to NT$1,700 a night (~$60 USD).
Here’s what my room looks like:
The room is quite small and the bed takes up way too much space, but thankfully there’s a desk and just enough room for me to lay down my yoga mat and practice in the mornings.
In terms of service, they’ve been extremely responsive via LINE throughout the entire booking process. During my stay here, they’ve occasionally sent cute little messages and gifts:
Looking at my spreadsheet now, it looks like some of the other options provide better deals in terms of room quality, but I’ve been satisfied with my stay here.
COVID-19 Testing
Between December 1 and February 28, all travelers are required to present a certificate of a negative COVID-19 test issued within three days of boarding. (I didn’t have to do this as I arrived before then.)
Arriving
Once you’ve booked your hotel and your flight, your airline will send instructions about preparing for your arrival. For example, within 48 hours of your flight, you’ll need to fill out Taiwan’s Quarantine System for Entry form. (Your airline will send you all of these instructions and confirm everything with you at the gate before you board your flight to Taiwan, so it’s hard to mess this up.)
When you arrive in Taiwan, they’ll separate all the passengers into two lines:
- People who have a Taiwanese phone number
- People who don’t have a Taiwanese phone number
Since the government uses your Taiwanese phone number for contact tracing and health checks, you’ll need to purchase a SIM card:
Once you have your Taiwanese number, you’ll use it to complete your Quarantine System for Entry registration. There are people around to help you through the process. (The woman who helped me spoke English, Chinese, and Korean, and I was incredibly impressed.)
Once you pick up your baggage and take some cash out from the ATM, you’ll need a way to get to your hotel. The government doesn’t allow people under quarantine to take public transit, so you’ll have to take a taxi or another form of private transportation. It seems like the government is subsidizing these taxis, so no matter where you go, the price is capped at NT$1000 (~$35 USD).
When you head out to the taxi stand outside, some people will come up and spray you and your luggage down (including the soles of your shoes!) with an alcohol solution. Isn’t Taiwan great?
When I arrived at my hotel, the taxi driver handed me the receipt and when I tried to hand him my NT$1000 bill, he kept pointing to the receipt and saying something in Chinese, which I don’t understand. It took waaaaay too long to work out that I was supposed to sign the receipt, which I didn’t expect since I was paying in cash. Hopefully this tip will save you from having a similar awkward back-and-forth.
Welcome to your quarantine hotel! You’ll become intimately familiar with it over the next 15 days, and in the next part of this series, I’ll share some thoughts about how to thrive rather than waste away in isolation.