Chinese visitor arrivals to South Korea in March rose +16.8% year-on-year to 601,671, maintaining a buoyant start to 2016 for Chinese tourism.
Chinese visitors are critical to South Korea’s travel retail sector (the world’s largest), with the nationality representing 43.3% of arrivals in March – and an even higher share of shop spending.
For the first quarter of 2016 Chinese arrivals surged by +17.1% over a strong 2015 base to 1,670,060.
Japanese arrivals (16.1% of the total) showed a rare and welcome growth year-on-year, up +2.5% to 224,328, rising +0.9% in the first quarter to 505,705.
Outbound Korean travel continued its strong year-to-date performance in March, though growth slowed to +10.8% over the same month in 2015. For the first quarter, Korean departures rose +18.3% to 5,558,427.
(Source: The Moodie Report )