Shall We Take an Online Trip with 'Gwangwangdure' Created by Local Residents?

[Asia Economy Reporter Donghyun Choi] The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced on the 4th that it will hold the ‘2021 Tour Dure National Conference’ online to share best practices of Tour Dure with the Korea Tourism Organization and to enable residents from different regions to communicate and interact.

Tour Dure is a policy project that supports local communities step-by-step?from discovering resident communities to business planning, startup, and management improvement?so that local residents can directly start and operate tourism businesses with unique regional characteristics in various fields such as accommodation, food and beverage, travel, and experiences. Since the project began in 2013, it has discovered over 600 resident businesses in 85 regions.

In this 6th event, under the theme ‘Tour Dure Jumanji (Local Travel Made by Residents) Festival (Festa), Let’s Travel Online,’ about 190 resident businesses will be able to meet directly online through various participatory events such as Tour Dure online travel.

From 3 p.m. on the 5th, for about an hour and a half, the official event including ▲the Excellent Dure Awards Ceremony and Best Practice Presentations ▲an introduction to the status and networking of local resident businesses by Tour Dure PDs ▲special lectures will be broadcast live on the Korea Tourism Organization’s YouTube channel.

In particular, through a public contest held on December 8 last year, eight excellent resident businesses were selected as Excellent Dure. Among them, three Excellent Dure, including ‘Mont Beer (Craft Union Cooperative)’ in Sokcho, Gangwon-do, which started from a local craft beer club and formed a cooperative to commercialize the business, will receive awards such as the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Award.

On the Tour Dure Jumanji Festa website, an ‘Online Exhibition Hall’ introducing various products from about 190 Tour Dure resident businesses nationwide to give visitors the feeling of a real trip, and an ‘Online Promotion Hall’ where visitors can experience vivid videos and testimonials of Tour Dure resident businesses actively promoting their projects, including Excellent Dure, in various content formats have been prepared.

Various participatory events such as ‘Find the Tour Dure characters Duki and Dubi hidden on the website!’ and ‘Please support Tour Dure!’ will also be held, and through a lottery, travel-related items such as functional cotton tents, camping chairs, and a ‘Tour Dure Lucky Box’ containing souvenirs that can be experienced at Tour Dure will be given as prizes.

A policy official from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism stated, “We hope that the Tour Dure project, which residents directly participate in and lead, will revitalize the local economy, which has been stagnated due to COVID-19. Furthermore, we will strengthen policy support so that local communities, which are collapsing in the COVID era, can be revitalized and connected to job creation.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.