ed Promoting local tourism

When it comes to talking about tourism, the primary focus is usually how to attract more foreign travelers. That is because the fate of our travel industry has been dependent in large part on the number of foreign visitors, especially those from China and Japan.

In fact, the proportion of local tourists in the nation’s travel industry remains at about 60 percent, compared with 70-90 percent in such industrialized countries as the U.S. and France. That means that a growing number of Koreans go abroad for tourism ― about 15 million Koreans took overseas trips last year, spending 19 trillion won.

So, it’s a welcome development that the government unveiled a package of measures particularly shedding light on the promotion of the local tourism during a meeting chaired by President Park Geun-hye. The package is badly needed to bring local residents thinking of going abroad back home to help cushion the shock from a possible dip in the number of foreign tourists due to currency volatility.

The package, among other things, proposed providing vacation subsidies to workers at small and medium businesses, and creating tourism weeks twice a year in May and September, during which schools will be free to give students short vacations so that families can go on domestic trips together. The government will also select three tourism cities every year to which it will provide up to 2.5 billion won.

With these measures, the government hopes to see the local travel market swell to 30 trillion won and employ 1 million by 2017, compared with 24 trillion won and 850,00 employees as of 2012.

We sympathize with President Park’s notion that “tourism is the goose that lays the golden eggs,’’ and it’s urgently necessary to create jobs and boost domestic demand through the activation of domestic tourism. But what matters is how we can put these into practice. More than anything else, it’s questionable if schools would give students short vacations at a time when they engage in cutthroat competition to enter prestigious universities.

The government’s ill-advised plan to ease regulations on the issuance of casino licenses to international investors is also at risk of sparking controversy, though allowing a casino on Yeongjong Island off Incheon is estimated to bring in 6.9 million more foreign tourists and additional travel revenue of 4.5 trillion won a year.

What’s needed then is to make our tourism infrastructure more attractive so that both local and foreign travelers don’t hesitate to open their wallets. The government needs to come up with more viable action plans that would enable local residents to enjoy sightseeing at home comfortably.