Foreign tourist arrivals last month top pre-pandemic levels on BTS comeback

A woman looks at a screen promoting BTS' Gwanghwamun concert in Seoul, March 15. Newsis

Foreign tourist arrivals in South Korea surpassed pre-pandemic levels in March, data showed Thursday, driven in part by fans coming to attend a landmark concert in Seoul to mark the long-awaited comeback of K-pop supergroup BTS.

More than 2.04 million overseas visitors arrived during the month, a 26.7 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the Korea Tourism Organization. The figure also marked a 33.2 percent rise compared with March 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global travel.

Chinese tourists represented the largest share of arrivals at 501,000, followed by 482,000 from Japan, 192,000 from Taiwan, 152,000 from the United States, and 75,000 from Vietnam.

Arrivals from China and Japan saw growth of 2.8 percent and 8.4 percent, respectively, from March 2019. Visitors from Taiwan surged 95 percent, while those from the United States rose 80.9 percent and arrivals from Vietnam climbed 59.3 percent.

The state tourism body attributed the sharp increase to a massive influx of BTS fans attending the group's performance in Seoul's Gwanghwamun area to mark its return after four years.

South Korea's outbound travel also saw an uptick, with 2,293,716 people traveling abroad in March, a 4.4 percent year-on-year increase. During the first quarter, 8.33 million South Koreans traveled overseas, up 5.9 percent from the same period in 2019, the data showed.