Jeju Island tries new way to remind visitors to behave

Tourists visit Hamdeok Beach in Jeju City, June 29. Yonhap

Confronting a surge in unruly tourist behavior, Jeju has unveiled the nation’s first multilingual etiquette notice, seeking to instill order on the southern resort island.

The Jeju Provincial Police said Monday it printed 8,000 notices in Korean, English and Chinese, hoping to bridge cultural gaps and help foreign visitors grasp local laws and customs.

The notices caution visitors against minor infractions — from jaywalking and littering to smoking in restricted areas and public drunkenness — and appeal for cooperation in maintaining order.

“Officers carry the notices during patrols and hand them out when they encounter minor violations on the spot,” an official at the Jeju Provincial Police Agency told The Korea Times. “Serious offenses are dealt with immediately, but for minor ones we usually issue the notice instead of stricter action.”

The official noted that offering a warning for petty violations, instead of imposing penalties on the spot, could defuse tensions with tourists and lighten the load for officers.

Multilingual public order notice / Courtesy of the Jeju Provincial Police Agency.

After years of pandemic disruption, Jeju, a perennial tourist draw for its balmy climate, has seen a sharp rebound in visitors, led by a surge in foreign arrivals. The restoration of direct flights — especially from China — has proven pivotal, with Chinese travelers now making up the largest share of overseas tourists.

Domestic travel, by contrast, has dropped as more Koreans seek cheaper holidays abroad in Japan and Southeast Asia. But the return of cruise ships and Jeju’s rising global profile, buoyed in part by the spread of Korean pop culture, have helped push total visitor numbers back toward prepandemic levels.

Jeju has already welcomed more than 7 million visitors this year, according to the Jeju Tourism Association.

Of those visitors, about 5.86 million were domestic tourists, down 9.3 percent from a year earlier. Foreign arrivals, by contrast, climbed 14.2 percent to more than 1.16 million, with growth surging in July, when arrivals leapt more than 40 percent from a year earlier.

As tourism has surged, concerns over tourist behavior and public order have grown as well.

Between March and June, the Jeju Provincial Police Agency carried out a special campaign targeting violations by foreign visitors. During that period, officers recorded more than 4,800 cases of disorderly conduct, including jaywalking, littering and public urination.

Viral episodes have amplified complaints about tourist misconduct.

In April, a woman caught smoking on a bus tossed her cigarette butt onto the road after fellow passengers objected. And last month, Korean media reported that a boy urinated near a bus stop by Hamdeok Beach in Jeju City as accompanying adults looked on.

Reflecting the growing frustration, six students from Pyoseon Elementary School also submitted suggestions last month to the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province’s website on promoting better behavior among tourists.

In the proposal, the students pointed out that there is no clear channel for reporting inappropriate behavior by tourists.