April 24, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] The number of Chinese tourists fell nearly 40 percent in March from a year ago after the Chinese government imposed a ban on selling trips to South Korea as part of its economic retaliatory action against the country’s decision to deploy the THAAD missile defense system.

The overall number of inbound tourists in the first quarter, however, slightly increased 3.2 percent on-year, reaching 3.72 million. This is attributed to the increase in the number of tourists from different countries such as Japan and Southeast Asia.

The number of inbound tourists from Japan surged 21.5 percent in the first quarter on-year, reaching 614,000.

To minimize further damage from the decreasing Chinese tourists, the South Korean government said it will put full efforts to diversify countries of foreign tourists. Accordingly, the Culture Ministry will host a culture and tourism fest in Vietnam on April 8-9, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the two countries’ diplomatic ties.

The ministry will also hold tourism fest in Singapore, Japan, the UK, Kazakhstan, the US and India until November.

The South Korean government will also kick off large-scale overseas advertisements starting July and will ease acceptance criterion for tourism interpreters for Thai, Vietnamese, Malay-Indonesian and Arabic languages.

By Park Yuna (yunapark@heraldcorp.com)