Japanese tourists to Korea in 2024 were up 39.2% year on year or down 1.5% over 2019 to 3.2 million, while Korean tourists to Japan up 26.7% year on year or up 57.9% over 2019 to 8.8 million. The total number of tourists between Japan and Korea exceeded 12 million, but the tourism industries of Japan and Korea recognized that a challenge is to fill the gap between Korean tourists to Japan and Japanese tourists to Korea.
Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) revealed at a BtoB tourism event in Tokyo that the tourism promotion body is focusing on spreading Japanese tourists to local regions, enhancing marketing activities for a core market of female travelers and boosting a group travel market.
“We would like to work together with the travel industry of Japan to discuss how we can send Japanese tourists to local cities in Korea,” Jang Mi-ran, Korean Vice-Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism said. “20s or 30s accounted for half of 12 million travelers between both of the countries. Young generation becomes a main character in the Korea-Japan travel market. We are going to support school trips or international studies more actively.”
Katsunori Takahashi, Senior Vice-Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport of Japan, said, “We want to use international events, such as Osaka Kansai Expo or APEC in Gyeongju, Korea as opportunities to expand exchange of travelers between Japan and Korea,” pointing out that 2025 is the 60th anniversary of the Japan-Korea diplomatic normalization.
Re-boosting the group travel market
International travelers to Korea were up 48.8% year on year or down 6% over 2019 to about 16.4 million in 2024. Japan was the second largest source market, following China (about 4.6 million travelers). KTO places Japan as an important market to achieve a goal of 30 million international visitors.
To send Japanese tourists to local regions, KTO is developing local experience activities, such as limited gourmet, festivals or events, seasonal experiences or combined tours of those. Also, KTO and Japan Association of Travel Agents (JATA) have jointly selected 30 landscapes to visit by local region and plan to organize a tour competition.
KTO is developing promotions for Japanese females to spend more in traveling in Korea and marketing activities to re-boost the group market from a longterm perspective.
“To fix the imbalance between outbound travel from Japan to Korea and inbound travel from Korea to Japan, Japanese travel agents should focus on local and added value as keywords,” Hiroyuki Takahashi, JATA Chairman, said. “One of what we have regretted is that we have focused on free-time typed tours combined a flight and a hotel only. What we have to do is to create higher value tours adding Korea’s original foods, cultures, history or nature to increase not only the number of visitors but also local spending.”
