South Korea’s travel and tourism landscape has seen an erosion of Seoul as its dominant destination and more and more foreign tourists are now arriving in and travelling to the regional airports of South Korea. During the first three months of this year alone, there were an estimated 850,000 foreign tourists who entered the country through one of the regional airports (a 50% increase over the same period last year). Additionally, there has been steady growth in the utilisation of sea transport for tourism, with hundreds of thousands of international tourists now using ships to travel and millions travelling on trains. In fact, in the first quarter of 2019, approximately 1.7 million international tourists used the Korean rail network.
The magnitude of this growth can be highlighted by the fact that if you were to have planned your trip to Korea just two years ago, you would probably have primarily planned on visiting Seoul, since it is ideally located to have everything you would want to do while visiting Korea (i.e, shopping, experiencing K-Pop culture, sampling street food, etc.), in one place. However, according to recent surveys, approximately 33 % of tourists would now choose to visit areas outside the metropolitan area of Seoul and spend a longer period of time in those areas than if they were simply making a brief stop at the various attractions of Seoul for just a few hours.
In just the three month period October to December 2022, total visitor days reported at all regional airports were anticipated to approach five million, which was a tremendous increase compared to the previous year, and resulted in an influx of additional dollars into the local economies. Regional total tourist spending continues to grow in areas outside of Seoul, with regional areas reaching total amounts spent on recreation or leisure of several hundreds of millions of dollars. When considering credit card transactions alone in non-Seoul areas, significant growth in transaction volume through the use of credit cards continues to occur in the form of large increases in credit card transaction volume. For the very first time, many small towns and local jurisdictions have begun to experience their share of the regional total $5 billion tourism revenue pie.
With many Koreans making domestic trips further away from Seoul than before, millions of domestic trips and trillions of dollars are being spent each month within Korea. Korea is rapidly becoming as popular again for domestic travel as it has been for international travelers for many years.
Tourism is a vital economic factor the National Government have recognised as a key revenue generator for services across Australia with the emphasis of developing tourism offices to promote regional tourism. A key part of this drive has been the establishment of a national policy to encourage investment in the regional development of tourism services, which is currently being rolled out.
The main goal is to distribute the economic benefit of total regional tourism revenue more evenly among all tourism destinations with considerable success to date.
International visitors to Korea are beginning to move away from crowded, traditional venues to find experiences that are more authentic and within some distance from typical tourist destinations. There are many, somewhat less popular travel destinations within South Korea (e.g., smaller towns/cities, coastal towns, rural regions) that offer more diverse options compared to Seoul (e.g., slower paced living, unique culture, smaller population).
While Seoul will remain a popular international destination for visitors, other areas of South Korea will increasingly be viewed as viable international destinations and will successfully compete with Seoul in this regard.
So, if this trend continues, don’t be surprised to see your next Korea travel itinerary include more less-known destinations than usual!
