SEOUL // In the bustling shopping district of Myeongdong in South Korea's capital, visitors from neighbouring countries have become so common that stores have for many years now displayed signs in Chinese and Japanese.
On a recent autumn afternoon, tourists from China and Japan moved among stores in the popular retail area, which has shops ranging from the high street names such as Zara to pricey designer labels including Louis Vuitton and Chanel, located near stalls selling street food and stuffed toys.
To make the shopping experience even easier for the visitors, virtually every store has staff who are fluent in the Asian languages.
"I'm in Korea for five days for shopping," says Sarah Yi, 32, from Guangdong. The chief financial officer for a company in China was shopping for cosmetics with a store assistant at her side, explaining various products in Cantonese. For her next trip, Ms Yi wants to travel to Paris, while the shopping destination of Dubai is also on her radar.
"The Chinese are rising as the new tourist," says Heung-sik Kim, a deputy director at Seoul's city government. "They're getting richer and spending more money on leisure and travelling. They start travelling to countries that are nearer and then they go further afield. Last year, Japan was the largest market for tourists to Seoul. Now China is expected to be number one this year."
This is all part of a boom in Asian tourism, spearheaded by China and predicted to last for decades.
The number of international tourists from Asia and the Pacific is expected to increase from more than 204 million last year to 541 million by 2030, according to new forecasts by the UN World Tourism Organization.
That means that an additional 17 million tourists on average are expected to travel from the Asia-Pacific region every year over the next two decades. Last year, the number of Chinese hotel guests staying in Abu Dhabi grew by 29 per cent, according to the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, while in Dubai the number of Chinese guests was up 18 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared with last year's first quarter, data from Dubai's Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing shows.
"Last year, fast growth was recorded in all three markets of domestic, inbound and outbound travels, including 2.1 billion tourist [trips] in the domestic travel market," says Jiang Du, the vice chairman of China's national tourism administration. "There were 57 million outbound tourists, up by 20 per cent."
Mr Kim says Koreans are also spending more than ever before on foreign travel.
"Young people in particular want to experience the world," he says.
The number of South Korean hotel guests in Abu Dhabi more than doubled in the first four months of this year, compared with the same period last year, with increased business between the Emirates and South Korea and the launch of Etihad Airways flights to Seoul in December cited as factors in the surge.
In the first four months of this year, 2,839 South Koreans stayed in Abu Dhabi's hotels and hotel apartments, up 118 per cent on the same period last year, according to the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority.
This prompted the authority to design a Korean version of its consumer website and send a delegation to South Korea's main tourism exhibition for the first time in June.
Along with China, India is a huge growth market that is feeding increasing numbers of tourists to the UAE.
"Our outbound has been increasing very fast," says Devesh Chaturvedi, the additional director general of India's ministry of tourism.
rbundhun@thenational.ae
