Year-end bonuses of 3 to 8 months? Lion Travel: A misunderstanding

▲ Lion Travel Chairman Wang Wen-chieh. (Photo / Reporter Lin Hsin-nan)

Travel Center / Comprehensive Report

After Lion Travel Chairman Wang Wen-chieh mentioned that Lion Travel would distribute year-end bonuses of 3 to 8 months this year, many people looked on with envy, but there were also former employees who revealed:The actual year-end bonus is at most only 0.8 to 1 month !”

ETtoday News Cloud received a letter from a former Lion Travel employee who stated they had worked at Lion Travel for over 6 years,but had only received a year-end bonus 4 times, with the highest being only 0.7 months.Additionally, other netizens revealed that Lion Travel originally planned to hold an expanded annual party (chunjiu) in March last year, but the “expanded” event was still undecided by 2014, and there has been no news about this year’s chunjiu either.

According to ETtoday News Cloud’s contact with Lion Travel, spokesperson Yu Kuo-chen stated that as the Lion Travel Group currently has over 2,600 employees spread across Taiwan, organizing a chunjiu event is not easy. As a result, no chunjiu was held last year, and the same considerations apply this year, so there is still no news.

In addition, the most talked-about “3 to 8 months year-end bonus” section was clarified by Yu Kuo-chen: the tourism industry often rewards employees with low base salaries and high bonuses. Therefore, Lion Travel uses the “annual performance earnings” method to calculate salaries, and each employee can receive approximately 13 months’ worth of salary per year based on personal performance.Which translates to a year-end bonus of around 1 month..

The “3 to 8 months of bonus” is actually built upon the annual performance earnings,and is a bonus issued according to individual business performance, distributed once each at the beginning and middle of the year. The accumulated total can reach up to 3 to 8 months’ salary, and is not the year-end bonus that the public and media misunderstood. As for the 3% salary increase quota, it is also an increase of 3% on the “total annual employee salary budget”, with incentives given to high-performing employees based on individual performance, and not every employee receives a 3% raise.