Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) will do everything possible to help boost the tourism industry around the country by making any and all of the tourist sites in the country easily accessible for tourists, both domestic and foreign, with the arrival of the peak tourism season, Fall and Chuseok holiday, which opened the golden holiday season for this year.
The state-run tourism agency will focus on the Daehangro (University Road) Tourism Performance Festival and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics to be held in PyeongChang, Gangwon Province, from Feb. 9-25 next year to spur tourism by building momentum leading up to big global sports events.
The Chinese government’s measures to cut tourists visiting Korea since March in retaliation for the South installing the THAAD self-defense system and North Korea’s nuclear weapons experiments so far his year, helped to reduce the foreign tourist arrivals in Korea by 21 percent YoY as of July 30. South Korea expects a total pf 12.56 million visitors this year.
But the tourists from non-Chinese areas, including Vietnam, are up 29%; visits from Iran are up 25.6%; tourists from Singapore rose 7.2%; Hong Kong visitors are up 4.1 pct; Japanese visitors are up 4.3%; Visits from Russia are up 18.2%; and Taiwanese visitors are up 12.3%.
The KTO worked hard to boost domestic tourism under the theme, “Let’s Cheer Korea with Travels,” with a set of ads, spring tourism programs from April 29-May 14 and summer tourism campaign from June to August.
The KTO tallied the number of tourists at 100 tourist joints across the country and found that they increased by 6.4 percent YoY, supported by a rise in the number of domestic tourists. The figures are projected to rise for the rest of the year thanks to various programs to spur tourism, including the government policy to encourage civil servants around the country to take all of the vacation days allowed.
The KTO plans to support the Daehangro Performance Festival Sept. 28-Oct. 31 to help all other tourism contents exciting and lively, especially for foreign tourists.
The foreign language translations will be available at 22 events, including musicals and festival for foreigners, to understand what the events are all about. The service will be extended to talk shows with the leading actors and galas for musicals and non musicals.
Along the way, the KTO wants to make Daehangro a key tourism site in Seoul, taking advantage of its proximity to a number of popular tourism assets such as the Changdok Palace, the East Gate (Dongdaemun) and DDP (Dongdaemun Plaza) so that the university street may become a popular tourist site in Seoul and thus make contribution to attracting foreign tourists to the location in the future.
In the meantime, the KTO is about to set up a 2018-Member PyeongChang Winter Olympic Figures Cheer Squad to publicize the winter Olympics around the world through a special advertising campaign.
The campaign will feature figures in 3-D rallying for the successful run of the global winter sports event at miniaturized stadiums of the winter Olympics. The first display will take place in Insadong, downtown Seoul from Sept. 28-Oct. 1 for both domestic and foreign viewers.
Residents in Korea will be recruited to have their figures made into 3-D and so they can participate in the 2018-Member PyeongChang Winter Olympic Figure Cheer Squad. The KTO plans to rally domestic tourism with a number of special tourism promotion programs, including an online event for the Chusok holiday period of Sept. 30-Oct. 9 dubbed, “the Hankawi Cultural Tour Period,” including the promotion of 10 tourist sites in the country that the Chusok holiday seeker might like to visit.
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