Tourists shopping at a duty-free shop in Seoul. ((image: Lotte Duty Free)
SEOUL, Apr. 2 (Korea Bizwire) — A large tourist group from Hong Kong is scheduled to visit South Korea next week, raising speculation that foreign visitors arriving here on incentive tours with their companies will further increase down the road, a trade promotion agency said Tuesday.
According to the state-run Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), some 18,000 employees of Prudential Hong Kong Ltd., are to visit the country from Tuesday to Saturday.
The number of foreign visitors on incentive tours to South Korea has remained in the doldrums in the past few years due to the diplomatic tension over Seoul’s deployment of a U.S. missile defense system.
Against such a backdrop, the Seoul government has been stepping up efforts to develop customized tourism programs that help attract more individuals and small tourist groups from China, while promoting campaigns to woo large tourist groups from other Asian countries that can offset the drop in visitors from the world’s most populous country.
The KTO said the number of tourists arriving here on incentive tours reached some 248,000 last year, up 22.6 percent from a year earlier.
(Yonhap)
