The number of foreigners who visited South Korea in 2011 reached nearly 10 million, posting double-digit growth for three consecutive years, the country's state-run tourism agency said Wednesday.

According to the Korea Trade Organization (KTO), some 9.79 million foreign tourists came to South Korea last year, up 11.3 percent from 8.79 million people a year earlier.

The number of inbound foreign tourists has grown steadily for the past three years, reaching 6.98 million in 2008 and 7.81 million in 2009, said the KTO.

By country, Japanese tourists took up 33.6 percent of the total visitors to South Korea, and Chinese and U.S. citizens came next, according to the KTO.

Due to unstable geopolitical conditions on the Korean Peninsula, the global financial crisis and the massive earthquake in Japan, South Korea's tourism industry went into a slump in the first half of 2011, said the KTO.

But later in the year, a growing number of foreigners chose to spend their vacation in South Korea as concerns over radioactivity in Japan eased and the burgeoning Korean pop music boom attracted Asian tourists, it noted.



Source Text

 

Source: Yonhap News (Jan. 18, 2012)