"Planning to Visit Seoul and Busan During Vacation"... Japan's Popularity for Korean Tourism Explodes

Japan's Most Popular Travel Destination 'Seoul'
'Busan' Ranks 7th

This summer, Seoul ranked first and Busan ranked seventh as travel destinations chosen by Japanese tourists.

On the 6th, Japanese travel agency HIS announced that Seoul ranked first and Busan ranked seventh among overseas travel destinations based on an analysis of their customers' summer vacation booking trends this year. HIS conducted the survey focusing on their overseas travel packages and airline tickets departing from the 21st of this month to the 31st of next month.

[Image source=Pixabay]

Seoul has maintained the top spot in HIS surveys from last year's year-end, this year's Golden Week (April 29 to May 7), through the summer vacation period. In particular, it was found that young Japanese people and women prefer traveling to Seoul. Among those who booked trips to Seoul, people in their 20s accounted for about 30%, and traveling with women only was the most common travel style at about 40%. The preference of Japanese tourists for Korea appears to be positively influenced by improvements in Korea-Japan relations and the Korean Wave (Hallyu).

Ranked 2nd to 5th were ▲Honolulu, Hawaii ▲Taipei, Taiwan ▲Singapore ▲Bangkok, Thailand, respectively. Additionally, Busan, which did not make the top 10 last year, ranked 7th this year.

HIS explained, "Overseas travel has increased sevenfold compared to last year, and Korea, in particular, is showing strong performance, recovering visitor numbers to pre-COVID-19 levels of 2019."

Meanwhile, the number of Korean tourists visiting Japan is also increasing. This is due to the continued 'massive yen depreciation' phenomenon and the rise in people choosing Japan because of affordable flight prices.

According to data released by the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), the number of foreign visitors to Japan in May was 1,898,900, which is 12.9 times higher than a year ago. However, this is still 31.5% lower than in May 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Specifically, among foreign visitors to Japan in May by country, Koreans were the largest group with 515,700 visitors, followed by Taiwan (303,300), the United States (183,400), Hong Kong (154,400), and China (134,400).

Koreans have accounted for the highest proportion of foreign visitors to Japan this year. From January to May, among the 8,638,500 foreign visitors to Japan, Koreans numbered 2,583,400, making up 29.9%.

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