[News] Lee Charm bets on attracting 10 mil. visitors.

[News] Lee Charm bets on attracting 10 mil. visitors.
Cr. - http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/

The head of Korea's state-run tourism promoter has pledged to mobilize all possible means to achieve the goal of attracting 10 million foreign visitors this year.

Lee Charm, CEO of Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), said Tuesday that attracting 10 million non-Korean visitors is a must for the country to emerge as one of the world's tourism powerhouses.

"We estimate that at least 9.6 million foreigners will come here in 2011, up from 8.8 million a year earlier. To host an additional 400,000 visitors, we have and will implement a range of aggressive marketing activities overseas, particularly in China and Japan", Lee said.

In the first eight months of the year, a total of 6.18 million foreigners came here, up 7.7 percent from the same period last year, despite an array of external and internal negatives. The number of Chinese visitors jumped 14.1 percent to 14.4 million.

The CEO said he has not given up on the target even after North Korea's shelling of Yeonpyeong Island late last year, the nationwide epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease early this year, and the massive earthquake that hit Japan in March.

"In light of all these negative factors, the odds of attracting 10 million foreign tourists were very slim early this year. But we never stopped trying. Fortunately, our efforts began paying off from June", he said.

To come up with effective measures to encourage more foreigners to come here, Lee met with the heads of nine overseas offices in China and Japan, and CEOs of major local travel agencies, Monday.

The KTO also decided to set up a taskforce to coordinate marketing campaigns abroad in order to bring more foreign tourists into the country in November and December when fewer people visit.

The state tourism promoter plans to make the best use of the increasingly popular K-pop scene to attract younger visitors, and implement a wide array of campaigns to attract foreign independent travelers (FITs).

The KTO will also target Southeast Asian tourists who usually go to Japan for winter sports to bring them here during the upcoming winter season.

To achieve sustainable development in the local tourism sector, the KTO head said the government should allocate more taxpayers' money for the industry.

"The government spends only 0.29 percent of its budget on tourism, substantially lower than Malaysia's 1.6 percent. If the government scraps unnecessary regulations and makes necessary investments, Korean can become a tourism powerhouse like Switzerland", Lee said

Among other improvements, Korea needs to build more hotels to accommodate the increasing number of foreign visitors, the CEO said.

"Seoul currently lacks 50,000 hotel rooms. There are simply not enough hotels in the city. If Seoul and the rest of the country has sufficient accommodation, it is not impossible for us to draw 50 million visitors in five to six years".