"We will achieve the early goal of 30 million foreign tourists visiting by 2030. We will open the era of 30 million inbound visitors by 2028."
Park Seong-hyeok, president of the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), announced a "10 flagship projects plan" under the slogan "era of 30 million foreign tourists in 2028" at a press briefing held at the Press Center on Sejong-daero in Seoul on the 2nd.
First, to expand inbound demand, it will deploy market-specific customized strategies. In the core markets of the Chinese-speaking region and Japan, it will focus on expanding "multiple repeat-visit demand" centered on regions and small cities. In growth markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East, it plans to stimulate demand to visit Korea by developing products linked to K-culture.
By strategically preoccupying high value-added markets such as medical, wellness and MICE (exhibitions and conventions), the tourism organization aims to lead the qualitative growth of Korean tourism, moving beyond mere quantitative growth of simply increasing the number of visitors. It will target high-spending segments with convergence and complex products that leverage Korea's strengths, and will also expand efforts to attract medium- and large-scale international conferences.
K-culture marketing will be carried out to induce visits to Korea. It plans to expand experiential campaigns that encourage consumer participation, going beyond audiovisual advertising-centered promotion. It will plan content in line with preferences by market and expand collaborations with local influencers to increase exposure of tourist destinations.
To revitalize regional tourism, it will newly introduce and operate a tourist and transportation integrated pass exclusively for inbound visitors. In shopping and dining, it will expand simple payment and duty-free shops for tax refunds, and strengthen collaboration with private platforms such as map and delivery apps to improve the user environment for inbound visitors.
Domestically, it will push to expand the "national vacation support package" so that the public visits regions more instead of going overseas. As a pilot program, it will carry out the "regional love vacation system" in 20 rural and fishing areas, refunding half of travel expenses when traveling to areas with declining populations. In addition, it plans to introduce the use of regional love gift certificates in the worker vacation support program to promote local spending.
To enhance the use of tourism data, it will advance the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of the organization's big data platform, the "Korea Tourism Data Lab." An official at the organization said, "We will build a tourism data hub that reproduces public and private tourism data into highly useful, high value-added data."
Park Seong-hyeok said, "2026 will be a year of transition in which tourism can take root as a new growth engine of the Korean economy, creating data-based execution and outcomes felt in the field," adding, "We will focus all the organization's capabilities on bringing forward the era of 30 million inbound visitors."