Domestic tourism remains sluggish a decade after Korea introduced a five-day workweek system, once billed as a golden opportunity for the leisure and tourism sector. Outbound travel, meanwhile, has grown steadily, data from the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports show.
According to the data reported to President Park Geun-hye during a meeting on tourism policies on Monday, the aggregate days that Koreans spent on domestic travel for all of 2012 were 360 million days, little changed from 350 million days in 2004 when the shortened workweek was introduced nationwide. The figure stood at 280 million days in 2011 and 340 million days in 2010.
Aggregate vacation days are a measure widely used here to gauge the domestic travel demand. It is calculated by multiplying the average number of days a single Korean spent traveling during holidays for an entire year by the country’s total working-age population.
Over the years, outbound travel has grown steadily. The number of Koreans travelling overseas rose to 14.84 million in 2013 from 12.48 million in 2010.
