Seoul’s Seongsu neighborhood was bustling with foreign visitors on the afternoon of April 9, 2025. The area has become known for its shopping and pop-up stores. (Shin So-young/Hankyoreh)
“We came here because it’s so easy to shop here — you can buy clothes, makeup and everything else all in the same area.”
Kanchaporn and Patda, both 30-year-old Thai tourists the Hankyoreh met on Seongsu’s Yeonmujang-gil on March 31, said that they found themselves drawn to the neighborhood in central eastern Seoul after seeing Korean influencers post about the area on social media. After visiting Busan two days before, the two planned on spending the rest of their time in South Korea visiting the Hapjeong and Hongdae areas. When the Hankyoreh visited the Yeonmujang area that day, it was bustling with tourists from not only neighboring East Asian countries, but from the Middle East and elsewhere as well.
Goodbye, group tours! The evolution of international tourist trends
Trends are changing when it comes to international tourists visiting Korea. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, group tours booked through travel agencies have become a thing of the past, with people from all over the world instead setting off for South Korea as individual travelers planning their own trips. Tourist attractions have also changed, with visitors flocking to places where they can experience how locals live and get a taste of what’s trendy among Koreans themselves.
“In the past, our best-selling products were middle and low-end guided group trips for Chinese tourists,” a person working at Hanatour told the Hankyoreh. “The trips had set routes, focusing on trips to Gyeongbok Palace, the Seochon neighborhood and Myeongdong.”
“Now, tourists prefer getting the same sort of experiences that Koreans have, visiting popular restaurants and enjoying what the locals enjoy. They have a particular interest in visiting places that are popular among younger Koreans and basing their travel plans around ‘experiences’ or ‘themes,’ like one-day K-pop dance classes,” the Hanatour insider said.
Seoul’s Seongsu locale, chock-full of fashion designers and independent beauty brands that can only be found in Korea, has become the new hip shopping mecca for tourists. From Korean fashion trends to brick-and-mortar beauty brand shops and boutiques, Korean trends that the world sees on social media are driving foreign visitors eager to try these things for themselves to the area.
Statistics from the Korea Tourism Organization show that foreign tourist spending in Seongdong District, where Seongsu is located, was 74.8 billion won in 2024, up 1.8 times from 2023 alone.
Retailers: Busy finding niche markets
Retailers are pulling out all the stops to entice international tourists visiting Seongsu to open their wallets. Musinsa, a booming online fashion store, opened a flagship store — Musinsa Store Seongsu@DaelimChanggo — in September 2024. There, one will find displays of various Korean fashion brands majorly popular among tourists.
The store also caters to foreigners, with helpful tech such as tax refund kiosk machines and QR codes that allow visitors to access translators. Musinsa also opened an offline store of its private brand, Musinsa Standard, in Seongsu in 2023.
“Foreign customers accounted for more than half of the transactions in the fourth quarter (October-December) since the opening of DaelimChanggo in September 2024,” a Musinsa insider told the Hankyoreh. “Also, as of March 2025, around 40 percent of the sales at Musinsa Standard came from foreign tourists.”
The Musinsa Store’s Daelim Changgo in Seongsu on March 31, 2025. (Park Ji-young/Hankyoreh)
Olive Young, a cosmetics, health and beauty company hailed as K-beauty headquarters, has also designated its stores in Seongsu and other districts as hubs for international shoppers, staffing the locations with employees proficient in foreign languages.
Seventy percent of all purchases at Olive Young N Seongsu, a massive store that opened near Seongsu Station on Line 2 of the Seoul Metro in November 2024, were made by foreign tourists.
“In line with the tourism trend of ‘living like locals,’ we saw more than 800,000 visitors as of the end of February,” an Olive Young insider said. “Not only have we seen an influx of tourists from Japan, China and Southeast Asia, but we have also seen more tourists from Europe and English-speaking countries such as the US and Australia.”
Seoul’s Seongsu neighborhood was bustling with foreign visitors on the afternoon of April 9, 2025. The area has become known for its shopping and pop-up stores. (Shin So-young/Hankyoreh)
The goose no longer laying golden eggs
Major duty-free shops, once touted as golden geese and a source of fierce competition between chaebol, have now turned into liabilities. The duty-free industry has entered an ice age for the past decade or so, first following the sharp drop in its noteworthy cash cow of Chinese tourists resulting from China’s retaliation to the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system in 2017 and then as tourism patterns have shifted to individual tourism following the pandemic.
Data from the Korean Duty Free Shops Association show that the amount spent per customer in January 2024 was 417,100 won (US$293), down 40.9 percent from January 2023. The four major duty-free shops — Lotte, Shilla, Shinsegae and Hyundai — reported a combined operating loss of 277.6 billion won in 2024.
In response, companies operating large-scale duty-free shops are demanding that the government lower rent and patent filing fees or are scaling back their operations. Hyundai Department Store Group’s Hyundai DF, for example, opted to close down its Dongdaemun duty-free store and scale down its World Trade Center duty-free outlet on April 1.
Shinsegae Duty Free decided to permanently close its Busan branch in January 2025, and Lotte Duty Free began encouraging its employees to voluntarily resign in August 2024.
“South Korea’s duty-free industry has moved beyond cutthroat competition to attract ‘daigou’ shoppers and has now entered a full-fledged phase of restructuring,” opined Daishin Securities analyst Yoo Jung-hyun.
By Park Ji-young, staff reporter
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
#Koreans #deem #trendy #foreign #tourists
