Creative Marketing Needed to Draw More Foreigners

If the travel industry's estimate is correct, about 210,000 Koreans will spend the Lunar New Year holiday not here but abroad. It is not certain how many foreigners will visit Korea during that period but the number will probably not exceed one tenth of the outbound travelers. Small surprise the nation's tourism deficit topped $15 billion last year, denting its services trade figure and tipping the overall current-account balance. If it were the 1970s, someone up on high would have banned overseas travel.

It's not news. The nation's tourism sector has been bleeding for years. Foreign tourists sum up Korea as a country of ``three nothings'' _ nothing to see, buy or play. Exaggerated but not wide off the mark: Would anyone be impressed by Gyeongbok Palace or the 63-story Daehan Life Insurance building in Seoul after seeing the Forbidden City in Beijing and skyscrapers in Shanghai? Meanwhile, playing golf on Jeju Island is two to three times as expensive as in Southeast Asian nations.

So President-elect Lee Myung-bak was right to call for a revamping of the troubled industry to turn it into a strategic sector and new growth engine. Meeting industry executives Monday, Lee also offered the correct remedy in the form of deregulation and tax breaks to bolster the money-losing services industry. It would have been much better had he stopped there, however. The president-elect went on to say his proposed ``grand canal'' would be of great help in attracting foreign tourists, citing the example of Dubai.

Some industry officials wasted no time echoing the words of the next president saying the cross-country channel would ``draw 1 million, or even 10 million Chinese.'' Could it be so simple and easy? A national waterway cannot be a tourist attraction in itself unless it is accompanied with inland tourism resources along its path. One needs to look no further than the nearly empty cruise services on the Han River, flanked by rows of ugly concrete structures called apartments.

Pushing ahead with what could end up as a permanent environmental disaster for short-term gains would be one of the dumbest thing a government can do. Korea is no Dubai, a desert country in which almost everything is possible without concerns about adverse environmental effects. Rather, the government should encourage the private sector to come up with creative marketing that can make up for insufficient natural attractions by developing cultural tourism products and reviving the flickering ``hallyu'' ― the Korean pop culture boom.

If Lee is genuinely interested in boosting the tourism sector, the first thing he should do is to instruct his transition team to keep the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as it is now, instead of striking out the ``tourism'' part. And the new government had better come up with a better tourism slogan than the present ``Korea Sparkling,'' which sounds like a champagne ad.