President Park Geun-hye presides over the second extended meeting of 

tourism-related ministers at Cheong Wa Dae on Feb. 3 as UNWTO 

Secretary-General Taleb Rifai looks on. 

President Park Geun-hye stressed the need for establishing a virtuous cycle of reinvigorating the local tourism industry, which leads to the boosting of domestic demand and job creation.

Park told the second extended meeting of tourism-related ministries at Cheong Wa Dae on Feb. 3, “Koreans’ overseas trips are surging, whereas local tourism remains unchanged.”  

Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism 

Yoo Jin-ryong gives a speech at the Cheong 

Wa Dae meeting. (photos: courtesy of Cheong 

Wa Dae and MCST, article by S. Y. Kim) 

The president announced the nurturing of the top five service industries, including tourism, as part of a three-year plan for economic innovation during her New Year’s news conference. To this end, she emphasized the need for massive regulatory and institutional reform. 

Park went on to say that the government needs to aggressively implement policies such as an alternative vacation system and a vacation subsidy regime to boost local tourism demand on top of developing attractive tourism content and programs. 

In particular, the president said efforts should be made to develop diverse tourism resources, centering around such experience tourism products as food tourism, eco-tourism, and rural village tourism, whose demand is on the rise these days. 

“People spend a combined 24 trillion won on local tourism yearly, which has production inducement effects estimated at as much as 39 trillion won and has an effect of creating some 500,000 jobs, and if local tourism rises only 10 percent, it will bring about great effects,” she said.

Park noted that the tourism industry is an industrial field in which changing people’s ways of thinking can have greater added values, and unnecessary restrictions, which are in existence conventionally, will have to be lifted to the core. 

The president ordered the participating officials to look into tasks raised during the meeting by making the most of the top five promising service tourism taskforces that made their debut recently. The government’s steps to boost local tourism will have to have synergy effects so that they can bring about a rise in real income of neighborhood residents of tourism sites and job creation, she said. 

Park made the point that local tourism strengths should be fully explored so as to meet people’s rising demands, and service, hospitality, and characteristic substance should be done at the world’s top levels.

“Something seen in Korea can be more attractive essentially, and local residents need to join forces in developing, operating, and settling their own tourism programs as shown in the case of “durae” (local communal groups) tourism.

She stressed the need for fixing the manpower mismatch, citing a case of Switzerl-and in which tourism high school graduates are dispatched into workplaces.  

The government announced a package of steps to boost local tourism, including providing vacation subsidies to workers at small and medium businesses, and creating tourism weeks twice a year in May and Septem-ber, during which students will be allowed to leave for short vacations so that families can go on domestic trips together. The government will also select three tourism cities every year to which it will provide up to 2.5 billion won. 

UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai also attended the Cheong Wa Dae meeting. He expressed the hope that Korea will be able to share with the international community its policy of successfully boosting tourism competiveness and thereby contribute to world tourism.