'THAAD retaliation hurting Korea's tourism'

By Jung Min-ho

The number of Chinese tourists to Korea has fallen sharply after China’s government started its retaliation over the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system here.

The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) announced a series of measures Wednesday to curb this trend and turn the crisis into an opportunity.

The retaliation has proven to be more damaging to the country’s tourism than the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak, according to the KTO. The number of Chinese tourists dropped by 63.6 percent between March 16 and April 9 (expected), compared with the same period last year.

The KTO thinks that the total number of Chinese visitors at the end of this year may not reach 4 million, which is less than half of last year’s 8.07 million. If the estimation becomes a reality, the economic loss is expected to be about 1.3 trillion won ($1.1 billion).

“Given how dependent Korea’s tourism industry is on China, the retaliation certainly is a grave threat,” Park Jung-ha, the KTO’s international marketing director, said.

In response to this, the KTO will promote the country’s tourist destinations more to Koreans, who would otherwise travel abroad.

The number of Koreans flying overseas on vacation has increased sharply over the past few years. The KTO plans to cooperate with regional governments across the country to develop tourism content, offer promotional events to change their destinations to places in Korea.

As part of this effort, the KTO said it has been studying policie of other countries in order to financially support Koreans who travel within their own country.

The KTO will also focus on attracting Japanese tourists. Last year, about 2.3 million Japanese visited Korea, a 25 percent increase from the previous year. The target number for this year is 3 million.

A promotional campaign, “My First Korea,” will be conducted in 18 Japanese prefectures. The KTO will also beef up promotional activities via social media to especially target Japanese women in their 20s and 30s.

By August, the KTO plans to establish an online platform, in which tourists can search information, make reservations and pay for all kinds of tourist services in their own languages with other benefits. The KTO will use artificial intelligence to develop programs, which can help them find what they need based on big data.

The organization will also try to create a more friendly and convenient environment for tourists from Southeast Asian countries.

The economic fallout on tourism from the anti-missile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) has become increasingly serious and could still get worse.

The shock came after the China National Tourism Administration ordered travel agencies to suspend organizing group and individual trips to Korea.

Woo, who began working at the division in May 2014 and was promoted to secretary in February 2015, remained there for 20 months until he resigned in October last year, following the emergence of the influence-peddling scandal that centered around Choi Soon-sil.

Woo is known to have received outstanding evaluations from Park especially for effectively controlling the prosecution — and by extension the police — using his connections as a former prosecutor.

Woo had telephone conversations on over 1,000 occasions with high-ranking justice ministry officials, all of whom are his friends, both before and after the corruption scandal broke out. The figures include Prosecutor General Kim Soo-nam, Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office head Lee Young-ryeol and the senior justice ministry official overseeing the prosecution Ahn Tae-keun. They all denied any wrongdoing claiming the conversations were about official duties, not personal favors.

Meanwhile, the prosecution has come under criticism yet again, for failing to include the charge of obstructing the Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office into alleged malfeasance of the Coast Guard in the Sewol ferry sinking in 2014 to minimize the blowback on the Park administration. It also failed to include the charge of his personal corruption including embezzlement of his family-owned company Jeonggang, a move indicating the prosecution’s unwillingness to hold him to a scrupulous standard.