SEOUL, KOREA - The Korea Tourism Organization has recently offered customized five-day tour packages of visiting Jeju Island and Gangwon Province each to the residents of the Qujiang New District, a newly emerging nouveau riche neighborhood in Xi'an, West China. The per-person prices are 8,280 yuan (US$1,328) for Jeju and 7,470 yuan ($1,198) for Gangwon, about twice more expensive than the usual packages.
That's because both offers included five-star hotel stays with top restaurants along the itineraries. Taking into account of the fact that Xi'an is one of the most polluted cities in China, the tour organizers threw in courses such as Jeju's famous nutmeg forest and Gangwon Province's Jade Garden Arboretum for full relaxation.
The Korea Tourism Organization, as well as local tourism promotion agencies, is offering a host of innovative tour packages for Chinese tourists, especially for those with deep pockets. For example, the Xi'an office of the Korea Tourism Organization organized early in May a tourism program for local CEOs to get a glimpse of Korean corporations including POSCO steel mills and Samsung Electronics chip-making plants.
After Samsung invested US$7 billion to build a chip assembly plant, Xi'an is full of excitement over the Korean dream. Earlier in April, the Chengdu office of the Korea Tourism Organization succeeded in attracting corporate executives in a tour package visiting Samsung companies, Samsung Medical Center, Samsung Raemian Gallery, and Shilla Duty Free Shop, and so on.
Other local-level tourism agencies such as the Busan Tourism Organization and Jeju Tourism Organization are also busy coming up with new upscale tour programs for Chinese visitors. Suh Young-choong, KTO's China specialist, said, "Up until now, the Chinese inbound tourism market has grown in quantity only. It's time to think about how to grow the market qualitatively. We at the Korea Tourism Organization are working on developing new tourism products targeting small segments of the market."
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