The Diplomat
The Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, received yesterday in Barcelona the President of the Republic of Korea, Moon Jae-in, with whom she discussed Spain’s interest in recovering the Korean tourist flows prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Korean tourists “are welcome to Spain and we are looking forward to receiving them very soon to rediscover the excellence and quality of our tourist destinations and products or the natural wealth offered by all Spain and that the Camino de Santiago allows to discover, especially this holy year,” said Maroto during the opening of the tourism conference between Spain and Korea, held in Barcelona and which brought together representatives of more than 50 companies from both countries to promote bilateral tourism exchanges.
“Spain wants to recover tourism flows between the two countries and return to the levels of 2019 where we were visited by more than 630,000 tourists from Korea, which is the third most important issuing market in Asia”, after China and India, added the minister during the event, which took place in the framework of the third and last day of the state visit of the South Korean leader.
Maroto also highlighted Spain’s commitment to digitalization and the application of artificial intelligence to the tourism sector and assured that South Korean citizens have at their disposal very useful tools to organize their trip to our country, as is the case of “the Travel Safe platform, which collects safety recommendations and data of interest for planning trips to Spain”. The Minister also informed the Korean delegation about the advances in the vaccination process in Spain, which offers “a horizon of hope for the resumption of safe travel and the reactivation of our tourism sector”.
After the event, Reyes Maroto and the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Republic of Korea, Hwang Hee, signed the one-year extension of the Action Plan of the Biannual Tourism Program 2020-2021, signed in January 2020 and put on hold after the pandemic.
According to pre-pandemic data, 630,000 tourists arrived in Spain from South Korea in 2019, up 29.6% compared to 2018, representing a market share of 0.8% of total international tourists. With an average stay of 6.4 nights and a total expenditure of 604 million euros, the average daily tourist expenditure was 2,268 euros. The main Autonomous Communities of destination were Catalonia (46.8%), the Community of Madrid (31.3%) and Andalusia (18.7%).
