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In 2023, South Korea saw 11 million international visitors, up 241 percent year over year. That’s also up to 63 percent of the pre-pandemic levels of tourism, and 2.1 million of the tourists were from China. The surge in tourism is welcome, but there are issues: Korea is actively trying to rein in a practice called “dumping tours,” where tourists buy cheap tours that in fact are entirely designed to just shepherd them to specific shopping locations. A survey of 3,100 tour packages in Seoul found that of the 100 lowest-priced packages, 85 of them were likely dumping tours, and 45 of them included six to eight shopping trips over the course of a five-day tour.
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