Chinese tourists power tourism balance surplus

Korea’s tourism balance has turned to surplus for the first time in 28 months as surging Chinese tourists have pushed up the tourism revenue past 1.7 billion dollars in September.

The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) said that September tourism revenues (1.7 billion dollars) increased by 35 percent year-on-year to post a record high in Korean tourism history.

On the other hand, Korean tourists spent 1.69 billion dollars overseas, a 77.6-million-dollar tourism surplus. This is the first time since Korea raked 96.7 million dollars of tourism surplus in May 2012.

This change was driven by youke (Chinese tourists), who account for nearly half the number of all tourists to Korea in September this year. Youke, who came to Korea in September, numbered 564,078, a 16.7 percent increase year-on-year. A total of 4.68 million youke visited Korea between January and September this year, accounting for 43.9 percent of all foreign tourists, which surpassed by a large margin 2.83 million Japanese tourists, the second largest foreign tourists to Korea.

The state tourism agency attributed other factors, such as increasing tourists from Hong Kong (46 percent), Thailand (57 percent) and Russia (38 percent), and a relative increase in the portion of tourists in their 20s to 60s, who have greater spending power than the under-twenty group, which are mostly students.