South Korea welcomed less than 10,000 tourist arrivals per month following the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic last year, a decline of more than 99% on the 1.33 million visitors in January 2020.
According to Yonhap News Agency, there were just 9,722 arrivals per month on average between April and December, including only 340 from Korea’s largest source tourism market China. There were also just 42 visitors per month from Japan – typically Korea’s second largest source market.
The lack of visitors has made life difficult for South Korea’s foreigner-only casino operators: Paradise Co recently reported a loss of KRW109.85 billion (US$98.4 million) and Grand Korea Leisure a loss of KRW64.3 billion (US$57.9 million) in 2020.
Tourism officials are hoping to arrest the decline in the coming months by establishing travel bubbles with regional neighbors based on certain criteria, which may include a travel pass to be acquired either through vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test.
Yonhap quoted an official from the Korea Tourism Organization, who said, “We set targets for foreign tourists by region at the beginning of each year, but it seems meaningless to set targets since we do not know when tourism exchanges will resume this year.”
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