The Tourism Administration on Monday opened a new office in Busan, hoping to draw visitors from southern South Korea to Taiwan and help push the number of South Korean arrivals back to the levels from prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the opening ceremony, Tourism Administration Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉) said that the new office would send Taiwan-South Korea tourism exchanges to new heights by promoting Taiwan’s culture, cruises and foods to prospective visitors in Busan and nearby areas.
About 550,000 South Korean passport holders visited Taiwan in the first 10 months of this year, making it the third-largest source of foreign arrivals, Tourism Administration data showed.
Photo courtesy of Tourism Administration
However, that number is only about 65 percent of what it was in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, when there were 1.24 million overseas arrivals from South Korea, the data showed.
Outbound travel by Taiwanese to South Korea has rebounded to about 90 percent of pre-COVID-19 levels in the past five months, the data showed.
The Busan office would offer tourism services and information for people in the four southern Korean metropolitan areas of Busan, Daegu, Gwangju and Ulsan, and other southern provinces, the Tourism Administration said.
Its main tasks would be to promote Taiwan as a tourist destination and attract more South Korean tourists from the nation’s south, it said.
The office would also work with travel agencies and airlines to promote Taiwan to independent travelers through forums, international tourism events, and multimedia advertising and promotional events, it said.
During the opening ceremony, several incentives and preferential offers were rolled out to lure potential tourists, including accommodation discount coupons worth NT$5,000 each.
The Busan office is Taiwan’s second tourism office in South Korea after a Seoul office.
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