Paid seats for Busan Fireworks Festival draw criticism
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The seats in the paying section for the Busan Fireworks Festival on the right side of Gwangalli Beach in Busan are empty while people packed the free section on the left to save seats hours before the event, Saturday. / Yonhap
By Choi Ha-young
Busan citizens have been disgruntled over the expensive tickets for the city’s famous fireworks festival and nearby restaurants’ high prices, saying the city makes money from the public event without proper supervision.
The 12th Busan Fireworks Festival attracted 1.27 million visitors Saturday, with 280,000 gathered at the city’s iconic Gwangalli Beach, the main vantage point. However, some paid seats were vacant until the end of the festival as they were last year, when the city introduced a fee system for the decade-old open-air event.
Since last year, the Busan Metropolitan Government (BMG) has charged 100,000 won ($87.6) for a plastic table and chairs, and 70,000 won for chairs only, without any snacks. About 6,000 seats were set up in the paying section on the beach.
The BMG said it started charging visitors to make the festival a self-sustaining tourist attraction. “By selling some paid seats to foreign tourists and firms, we can invest the money into next year’s festival and improve the quality of the event,” the organizing committee told the press.
However, citizens complained there was no tangible improvement at the beach, for example transportation infrastructure remained poor.
“The festival for citizens has been reduced to the city government’s moneymaking tool,” a blogger said.
“The price of the festival is ridiculous considering the plastic chairs and tables,” a Busan resident Park Yong-seok, 26, told The Korea Times.
Many also pointed out that the paid seats have become an excuse for rip-off prices at nearby restaurants and bars ― establishments with a good view of the fireworks raised the price of food for that day, citing the ticket price of the city-prepared seats. Some bars charged 500,000 won for a bottle of wine and dessert for four.
“The city government has failed to solve the problem of high-priced food at nearby cafes and restaurants but it pushed up the prices in general with the paid seats,” Park said.
Similar controversy rose last year in Jinju, South Gyeongsang Province, when the city government started to sell tickets for the Jinju Namgang Yudeng Festival, a lantern show on the Nam River, for 10,000 won.
This year, Jinju City Government distributed free weekday tickets to its residents and provided a 50 percent discount for neighborhood visitors. The local government said the festival earned 3.4 billion won this year, helping it be financially independent from the central government for the event.
Meanwhile, Seoul International Fireworks Festival is free due to the sponsorship of Hanwha, the nation’s 10th-largest conglomerate and the organizer of the festival.