My life at a Korean law firm (part 48)

Foreign tourists in Seoul. / gettyimagesbank

By Jacco Zwetsloot

At the Discover Seoul Desk, our main job was marketing and selling tours. The tour company for which I worked was the Korean tour company that happened to win the bid for exclusive rights to run tours for the hotel on the base.

The company produced a booklet of ready-made tours, most of which are in Seoul and to the usual tourist destinations: royal palaces, the folk village, amusement parks, N Seoul Tower, and so on. These booklets were distributed by the box-full to various hotels around town, as well as on Yongsan Garrison. In early 2012, I was professionally photographed at all these sites, and for three years my grinning visage greeted tourists flipping through that booklet.

The most popular tour by far was and remains the full-day JSA and DMZ tour. This tour takes tourists to various see the demilitarized zone and joint security area. I had the opportunity on several occasions to lead this tour as a guide.

Customers boarded a bus early in the morning and go north to Imjingak (as far north as most Koreans can go without special permission), cross the bridge into the Civilian Control Zone, and stop at the Third Infiltration Tunnel, Dorasan Station (on the railway line between Seoul to Pyongyang and beyond to China), and eventually to what used to be USFK Camp Bonifas. There they got off and switched to another bus controlled by the UN Command. The tour guide would then give way to a U.S. soldier who would lead the tour into the Demilitarized Zone and the Joint Security Area.

U.S. military personnel and their families like this tour because it seems to encapsulate in one symbolic tour why they are in Korea. They get to look into North Korea, maybe even see a North Korean soldier, and hear about the importance and difficulty of keeping the peace.

The tour highlight is when the group is ushered into a Military Armistice Commission conference building, where the room is half in North Korea and the other half in South Korea. Simply by walking around the conference table, tourists can step to "the other side." It is a simple conceit and a highly successful sales gimmick.

JSA tours run Tuesdays to Saturdays, and the name and passport number of each traveler have to be sent 48 hours in advance in a list to the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission (UNCMAC) that oversees the demilitarized zone, so there was a cut-off point in selling JSA tours for any given day.

In our desire to sell every seat, sometimes we sailed close to the wind and lists were almost sent in late, so we had to make an internal cut-off 72 hours before the tour. That meant that if a tourist wanted to go on a Wednesday, he or she had to book and pay by first thing Sunday morning.

Not all nationalities are allowed to participate in JSA tours. The Chinese, for example are forbidden, because they fought for the North Korean side in the Korean War. They are, however, allowed to do the DMZ tour (third tunnel and Dorasan station, but no entry within the demilitarized zone itself). In 2012 almost all the 20 or more tour buses at the 3rd infiltration tunnel were for Chinese tour groups.

On the way back to Seoul, the tour bus stopped at either the amethyst or ginseng center. I never visited the latter, but the former seemed like a high pressure sales place. Prices were high, but were shown as if drastically reduced in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy jewelry inlaid with this semiprecious stone. There were almost as many staff as there were tourists, working hard to convince them to buy a ring for $250 for example.

These side trips were a mandatory part of every tour while I was there ― not just JSA & DMZ tours. Also, other competing tour companies seem to do the same. Internet review sites are replete with negative comments about overpriced items. I never saw any explicit proof, but I assume that both these places were providing some kind of commission or kickback to tour companies for bringing in potential customers.

Even leaving that aside, in terms of profitability, the JSA-DMZ tour is hands down number one. There are few overheads ― tour guide, driver, and bus, and an entry fee at Imjingak. The rest is free. No wonder the tour companies in Seoul all vie for slots to the JSA. However, these are limited. UNCMAC only gives out a limited number of slots. From memory, it was one each morning and one each afternoon.

A handful of tour companies liaise with UNCMAC and receive a portion of those slots. In order to fill every available seat and not to turn away a customer, the tour companies sell tours on behalf of each other. For example, if a visitor to our desk wanted to go on Friday but our company was only running JSA tours on Thursday and Saturday, we would receive payment and pass on that tourist's details to whichever company was running JSA tours on Fridays. On the tour day, one of our buses would then ferry the tourists to the start point for the other company's tour.

Although the tours started just outside gate 1 of the Yongsan Garrison, they usually did not end there. This drop-off service, something the Korean tour companies call "sending" was an optional extra that would only happen for a fee. Generally, these tours would end in Itaewon, in Myeongdong, or at a hotel in downtown Seoul. When selling the tours, we always had to explain this clearly to the customers, but even those who heard and forgot that message would give negative feedback when they found they had to make their own way back to the base.

To assist in this process, the hotel had countless "taxi cards" with maps and directions for taxi drivers, showing them how to bring people back to the gate. One person came back later and complained that we had not been clear that the card was not a voucher that would pay for the taxi. She had taken it for granted that simply handing the card to the driver would take care of the fare as well as instruct the driver which route to take.

(I should point out that JSA tours have not run since October 24, 2018, because of the changes taking place in the demilitarized zone. It is not clear when tours will restart.)