Korea Tourism Organization holds press conference for new president Park Sung-hyuk

*This content was translated by AI.

- Top 10 Representative Projects Announced in 2026 Tourism Becomes South Korea's Growth Driver

On the 2nd, the Korea Tourism Organization (President Park Sung-hyuk, hereinafter referred to as 'construction') held a press conference for the new president Park Sung-hyuk at the press center. On this day, President Park Sung-hyuk announced a construction project plan for 2026 to advance the era of 30 million visitors to Korea along with management costs.

The corporation will set 2026 as the 'first year of implementation' to attract 30 million people and focus on the top 10 representative projects with the aim of transitioning to a 'tourism industry that comes more, stays longer, and opens the future'.

- Inflow: Power to come, target the market directly to create more demand for visiting Korea -

In order to expand the inflow of visitors to Korea, inbound marketing will be advanced with customized strategies for each market. Based on the data, the Korean market will be subdivided and overseas marketing for new and growth markets will be expanded. Key markets such as China and Japan focus on expanding the "nth demand for revisiting" such as regions and small cities, while growth markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East actively absorb demand for visiting Korea through K-culture-linked products. The Gumi-ju market will expand its online and offline contact points using K-culture to create new demand.

It strategically preoccupies high value-added markets such as medical, wellness, and MICE, leading the qualitative growth of Korean tourism, away from quantitative growth that simply increases the number of visitors. It plans to focus on high consumers with convergence and complex products that take advantage of Korea's strengths such as medical, wellness, and beauty, and expand the attraction of medium and large international conferences to increase demand for high value-added and regional visiting groups.

In addition, it will promote the "Visiting Transition" K-culture brand marketing so that the world's interest in K-culture leads to actual visit to Korea. It will expand experiential campaigns that induce consumer participation beyond audiovisual promotion such as advertising, and increase appeal to Korea through content planning reflecting market preferences and collaboration with local influencer.

Systematically improve the inconvenience of the entire process of visiting Korea so that foreigners can recognize Korea as a "place they want to visit again." It operates a "tourism service monitoring group" in which the whole nation can participate to constantly check inconveniences from the perspective of visitors and continue to discover field-oriented improvement tasks. In addition, in order to increase the convenience of moving to the region, it will support the improvement of the local tourism and transportation system, while introducing and operating new integrated tourism and transportation passes exclusively for foreign visitors. In the shopping and food sectors, simple payments and post-tax duty-free shops will be expanded, and cooperation with private platforms such as maps and delivery apps will be strengthened to improve the environment for foreign visitors. In addition, in order to solve the structural problems of local tourism sites, we plan to promote a new demonstration project in cooperation with AI technology companies, and to spread the improvement results verified in the field throughout tourism services. It aims to establish and settle a virtuous cycle structure in which foreign visitors' satisfaction with visiting Korea leads to revisiting and recommending by increasing the quality and reliability of service during the entire process of visiting Korea.

- Experience: The power to stay, Korean tourism experienced by the people and region -

The "National Vacation Support Package" will be expanded so that citizens can visit more regions instead of overseas. A pilot project for the "Regional Love Vacation System" that refunds half of travel expenses when traveling to population-reduced areas will be promoted in 20 rural and fishing villages, and the use of local love gift certificates will be introduced in the workers' vacation support project to promote consumption in the region. In addition, discounts for two nights or more and discounts in island areas will be expanded to increase stay in the area.

The 'Digital Tourism Resident Card' project, which coexists with population-reduced areas, will also be advanced. Expand participating areas and benefit companies and increase accessibility through the establishment of dedicated websites and apps to induce local revisiting.

At the same time, a new "topic attraction discovery project" will be promoted to discover attractions throughout Korea. It analyzes construction and private platforms and social data to discover themes of high public interest, and selects representative attractions for each theme to introduce new things to see and enjoy in the region. In addition, it creates a structure for tourists to stay in the region for a longer time by expanding the selection of global festivals and fostering tourism contents such as island tourism.

- Leap: Power to Open the Future Accelerates Tourism Industry Innovation with AI and Data -

The government will restructure AI and data-oriented structures and strengthen execution power so that the tourism industry can be transformed into a structure that creates continuous added value. Focusing on this year's newly established Tourism AI Innovation Headquarters, the tourism guidance system will be converted to an 'AI-based single guidance platform' by 2028, and a number of B2C channels will be unified around 'Vigit Korea (visitkorea.or.kr ). It increases the convenience of travelers by developing 'AI Travel Secretary', a multilingual integrated information chatbot.

Through the internalization and advancement of AI in the Korea Tourism Data Lab, the corporation's big data platform, the data base for the era of 30 million visitors to Korea will be strengthened. By establishing a data lab-only sLLM (small giant language model), AI-based data analysis and commentary functions will be advanced, and a tourism data hub will be established that combines public and private tourism data and reproduces it as highly utilized high value-added data.

In addition, it plans to expand the discovery and support of tourism ventures and local tourism companies with innovative technologies to strengthen the competitiveness of the tourism industry ecosystem, and actively support market-leading technology demonstration and overseas expansion through open innovation with large and medium-sized companies.

2026 will be a year of transformation to create data-based implementation and results felt in the field so that tourism can become a new growth engine for the Korean economy, said Park Sung-hyuk, president of the corporation.

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*This content was translated by AI.