Shanghai resumes group tours to ROK

Travel to the Republic of Korea is expected to remain stable, as four major travel services in Shanghai have recently resumed group tours to the country, tourism experts and insiders said.

Group tours to South Korea were suspended in protest following the United States' deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system in the country in March last year. As tourism is affected by the political climate, it may be quite hard for outbound travel to the country to regain the popularity it had before, experts said.

Shanghai Jinjiang International Travel, which resumed group tours to South Korea on Thursday, said it is hard to predict the public response.

"I don't think the resumption of group tours will cause a sudden burst of tourism," said Wang Fang, manager of outbound travel department of Jinjiang.

Shanghai China Youth Travel Service said group tours to South Korea will be officially resumed next week and the first groups will depart in mid-September.

Such group tours from Beijing were resumed in December, followed by Shandong and Hubei provinces and Chongqing, but the market remained bleak, according to experts.

People had still been able to travel to South Korea independently.

Local news portal Shanghai Observer cited statistics from the Korea Tourism Organization that residents from the Chinese mainland made nearly 4.17 million trips to South Korea in 2017, a year-on-year decline of more than 48 percent.

"If there were no tensions in bilateral relations because of the deployment of the THAAD system, I believed the people-to-people exchanges between the two countries would be smooth and the openness of the tourism market would be greater," said Zhou Yingfeng, general manager of the outbound travel department of Shanghai China Youth Travel Service.

Public response on the internet was almost one-sided, with many saying they would not travel to South Korea until the US anti-missile system was removed.

He Jianmin, a professor of tourism management at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, said: "Outbound cruise liners have also canceled routes to South Korea since March last year, but the industry kept expanding."

Some experts said the unfavorable impression many Chinese have about South Korea because of the THAAD deployments could be long-term and reach beyond the tourism industry to probably once immensely popular South Korean TV series, brands like Samsung cell phones, and the South Korean restaurant business.

Yao Li, a teacher at the international business school of Zhejiang Gongshang University, said his research found that since February 2017 South Korean restaurants in 50 cities across China have suffered an average 30 percent drop in business, and the number of new restaurant openings has dropped by 60 percent.

Xu Junqian contributed to this story.