The battle between Korea and Japan in tourism is on the rise. Who will win? Continuing from ① Korea and Japan안전놀이터, neighboring countries, are bound to be rivals in the tourism industry as well. In a survey conducted by the Korea Tourism Organization on foreign tourists who visited Korea in 2019, Japan was the most used country as a comparison target when visiting Korea, at 54.3%.As a result, the overwhelming majority of respondents (93.7%) said they only visited Korea, but among those who said they visited other countries together, 39.7% responded that they visited Japan before Korea.Since it is the choice of the vast majority of foreign tourists to choose only one country, either Korea or Japan, to travel to, it can be said that a ‘zero-sum game’ in which one fails if one fails to defeat the other country also occurs in the tourism industry.Unfortunately, Korea is struggling in the ‘Korea-Japan tourism war’. The number of foreign tourists visiting Japan in 2019 was 31.88 million, twice that of Korea at 17.5 million.In the 2021 World Economic Forum ( WEF )’s Tourism Competitiveness Index, Japan ranked 1st, while Korea ranked 15th.
In Korea, there are more Korean tourists traveling abroad than foreign tourists visiting Korea. As a result, the travel balance has been in deficit for 22 consecutive years since 2000. In 2017, it had a deficit of $14.7 billion (about 19.5878 trillion won).
On the other hand, Japan’s travel balance, which had been in deficit for 10,000 years, returned to surplus for the first time in 53 years in 2015. In 2019, the travel balance has been in surplus for eight consecutive years, with a surplus of 2.7023 trillion yen.
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