Yanolja Cloud Pte. CEO Kim Jong-yoon speaks at a press conference at a hotel in western Seoul on June 20, 2023, in this photo provided by the company.
SEOUL, June 20 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s major travel booking platform Interpark Corp. on Tuesday announced its vision to attract 50 million foreign travelers to South Korea annually by 2028 as it has changed its name to Interpark Triple Corp.
Interpark Triple said it plans to develop K-travel package programs and tourism in local cities, as well as Seoul, to meet the goal.
Interpark Triple is a ticketing platform under the country’s leading travel platform operator Yanolja Co., which also owns hospitality solution provider Yanolja Cloud Pte.
“The newly born Interpark Travel will play a pivotal role in developing South Korea into a travel giant based on its unrivaled competitiveness in content and innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technology specialized for travel,” Chae Hwi-young, the company’s CEO, said.
Chae said Interpark Triple will develop travel package products that cater to foreign travelers’ evolving interest in South Korea, such as K-pop and K-dramas, based on big data and AI technology.
“About 63 percent of foreigners said they wanted to visit South Korea after experiencing Korean culture,” Yanolja Cloud CEO Kim Jong-yoon said, noting the collaboration of K-culture and K-travel will create a big storm in the tourism industry.
“If South Korea succeeds in attracting 50 million inbound travelers per year by 2028, it will enjoy an economic benefit worth 300 trillion won (US$234 billion) every year,” Kim said, noting the benefit is around twice the size of the 168 trillion-won worth of exports the semiconductor industry raised in 2022.
The number of foreign visitors to South Korea hit a record high of 17.5 million in 2019, generating tourism revenues of $20.7 billion, according to data compiled by the Korea Tourism Organization.
However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of visitors dropped sharply to 2.5 million in 2020 and 967,000 in 2021 before increasing to 3.19 million in 2022.
To reach the goal of attracting 50 million inbound travelers, Kim said Yanolja Cloud will cooperate with local airports, local governments and local tourism industries to develop diverse travel products that provide travelers with experience in different parts of South Korea, not only Seoul, and distribute the products across the global network the cloud service has created over the past five years.
Furthermore, Yanolja Cloud will strive to become the No. 1 travel technology company worldwide, becoming a global platform for travel content, Kim added.
This file photo shows Yanolja’s headquarters in southern Seoul. (Yonhap)
Yanolja Cloud has been working to expand its business abroad, providing more than 80,000 solution licenses related to property, room and revenue management, as well as channel management for booking sites to companies across about 170 countries around the world.
The solution provider CEO also said South Korea’s tourism has a large growth potential, noting the country was lagging behind the growth of the global tourism industry.
In 2019, South Korea suffered a tourism deficit of $8.5 billion compared with a global tourism profit of $28.7 billion, according to Yanolja Cloud.
In 2022, the global tourism industry rebounded to 66 percent of its pre-COVID-19 level, but South Korea only saw about an 18 percent recovery in tourism.
Compared with regional competitors, South Korea saw a tourism loss of 1.5 trillion won as of January, while Japan enjoyed a profit of 1.76 trillion won.
Yanolja CEO Lee Su-jin said unlike Japan and Vietnam, which have multiple travel destinations, for South Korea most tourism is concentrated in Seoul and the company will work to develop other travel destinations in the country.
“With the synergy between Yanolja, Yanolja Cloud and Interpark Triple, we will actively support the 50 million inbound traveler era of South Korea,” Lee said.
(Yonhap)
