Please wait a moment
Since 2022, each summer has brought a different way for Hotel Royal Group to step into the city.
A street, a local story, or a way of life still carried on today can become the beginning of a journey. Following local footsteps, we gradually begin to understand how the scenes before us came to be.
We call this way of traveling a “local point of view.”
The idea is simple: stay a little closer to the place itself. When travel becomes more than simply passing through, the traces left in streets, buildings, and everyday life begin to reveal more stories to be read.
We began to imagine a broader role for the hotel, beyond providing a place to stay. Travel reflects the way we live at a particular moment. What a hotel can offer, then, goes beyond a standardized space: it can become an entry point into the city itself, giving travelers a different way to understand everyday life.
Following a postal worker through the Taichung Mail Processing Center reveals the city at work in its most immediate form. Through these everyday movements, the pulse and warmth of the place come into view, bringing the island's memories into sharper focus.
Since the first Hotel Royal opened in 1977, sincerity and warmth have remained at the heart of what we call “Taiwanese hospitality.” Rooted in a close relationship with the land, this sensibility has retained its own quiet weight even as generations and ways of traveling have changed.
As travel habits continue to shift, that connection to place has led us toward local revitalization and the creation of Royal Explorer, searching with travelers for new ways to understand the value of a journey.
Leaving the familiar behind, the journey begins at Taipei 101 and follows the Tamsui-Kavalan Trails on foot to Hotel Royal Chiaohsi. Along the way, travelers test their own limits and encounter choices that reflect how they wish to live.
Eight people who challenge convention lead the way along routes outside the mainstream: a kitchen devoted to collecting waste, a barbershop that does not cut hair. In places that resist familiar rules, the city comes into view again from another angle.
As generations change, travel has become increasingly connected to personal values. Culture is being looked at anew, global perspectives exist alongside local experience, and travelers are seeking ways of traveling that feel closer to who they are. Travel, in this sense, becomes a choice that reflects one's way of life.
We step into the city to notice scenes that are easily overlooked. By pausing there and seeing them again from another angle, an ordinary place can become somewhere worth lingering.
We hope to be a starting point for travelers discovering this island, turning unseen landscapes into unforgettable stories.
Royal Explorer
Local culture lives on in sounds that are sung again and again, and heard anew.
In temple courtyards, Beiguan music has accompanied local faith through the passing years. Indigenous songs carry memories of rituals, work, and life on the land. Elsewhere in the city, records, dance halls, campus folk songs, rock, and theatre reveal how people of different eras gathered, found entertainment, and expressed themselves. Sound rarely exists on its own; it is always close to the life of a place.
As time moves forward, familiar melodies find new places to be heard. Records once played in dance halls return in today's parties, campus folk songs are sung again, and traditional music continues through those who learn and perform it. The listeners and the times may change, while the connection between sound and place carries on.
In 2026, Royal Explorer takes 《Resonance Of the Island》 as its theme, following nine routes to the places where sound happens—from Beiguan and ancient Indigenous songs to the moon lute, Taiwanese-language songs, campus folk, vinyl, rock, and theatre. Sung, performed, and remembered across generations, these sounds piece together the everyday life of cities across Taiwan.
How a hotel understands the city it calls home also shapes the way it meets its travelers.
Hotel Royal Group has long looked closely at the culture, everyday life, and local stories of cities across Taiwan. Royal Explorer extends this perspective into travel, approaching a place through a different theme each year and offering a new way to know the city.
Together Stronger is a partner culture built by Hotel Royal and its colleagues. Through learning, exchange, and shared experiences, brand values become part of everyday work, while colleagues gain opportunities to see places from different perspectives and understand one another.
Colleagues from different hotels travel to other cities and take part in locally curated Royal Explorer journeys. Through firsthand experience, they get to know the place and one another along the way.
Read More →Local flavors encountered through Royal Explorer are brought back to the staff table, offering another way to understand the culture and everyday life of different cities through food.
Read More →This understanding of place continues within the team through the Royal Explorer Exchange Program and Together We Dine. Colleagues from different hotels encounter local cultures, travel experiences, and regional flavors firsthand, then bring those perspectives back into their daily work.
As colleagues become more familiar with a city, they gain more ways to share the place with travelers. Through service and conversation, the cultural perspectives gathered by the brand become part of how travelers come to know Taiwan.
Royal Explorer
Royal Explorer
Royal Explorer
Royal Explorer
Royal Explorer
The deeper we know a place, the differently the city comes into view
Hear another local story or learn about a way of life, and a familiar street may begin to reveal things once overlooked. The city itself has not changed, yet the way we see it quietly has.
Over the years, Royal Explorer has begun with local culture and everyday life, stepping into neighborhoods, stories, and the places where people live. Returning to these places again and again brings new clues to familiar cities and a deeper understanding of how the scenes before us came to be.
A different point of view reveals another side of the city.
