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The World Cup fervor is growing but "World Cup Special Tourism Districts" are not seeing many overseas visitors leading merchants to become angry with the government. Angry voices say the government's prediction that hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists will come, has turned out to be merely a rosy expectation.
The government expected 360,000 foreign tourists for the World Cup alone, based on a report by the Korean Development Institute (KDI) last year. The KDI assumed that the 790,000 foreign tickets would be sold 100% and calculated that one tourist sees an average of 2.5 games, resulting in 316,000 tourists, plus Chinese tourists. The government added regular tourists and anticipated that 600,000 foreigners would come to Korea during the World Cup. Because of this, the alarm for accommodation facilities went off in regional self-governing districts, and there was a rush to make tent camps.
However, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism altered the estimation to 232,000, 130,000 fewer than that first made by the government. They lowered the foreign ticket sales to 603,000 from 790,000 dropping the sales percentage from 100% to 60%. However, foreign ticket sales were so low that even this number will be hard to reach.
According to the Immigrations Office on June 11, the number of foreigners entering the country from May 15 to June 8 was 239,158, or 15.4% lower than that of the same period last year. Japanese tourists recorded 98,104, 39.8% lower than last year as did Americans; only Chinese increased from 17,913 to 26,451.
Because of this, World Cup Special Districts lost out as even "bag traders" disappeared. Jung Gi-su, who runs a sock wholesale business at Shinpyunghwa Market in Dongdaemun, Seoul, said, ¡°Even the Chinese and Russian bag traders, who used to buy hundreds of pairs two or three times a month have stopped coming and sales have fallen about 40%." After the World Cup started, Japanese customers, which make up 70% of the sales in Itaewon also stopped coming.
Busan appointed 813 places as ¡®Word Inns¡¯ for low-priced rooms for World Cup foreign tourists, but only 14% of the 12,000 rooms have been reserved. In Seoul, 6,400 out of 13,000 rooms have been reserved. Even the 78,000-pyong camping grounds, which were made for backpackers next to the World Cup Park in Sangam-dong, Seoul and can accommodate 640, only have 30-40 campers on weekdays and 100 or so on weekends.
(Im Hyeong-gyun, hyim@chosun.com )
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