Foreign visitors wearing Korean traditional costume, "hanbok," tour around Gyeongbok Palace in central Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap By Lee Hae-rin Korea has received more inbound tourists from the United States, Taiwan, Indonesia and Singapore during the first four months of 2024, compared to the pre-pandemic record-high from 2019, Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) data showed Thursday. Korea saw some 4.
6 million inbound tourists between January and April this year, according to the KTO. The figure is an 86.9 percent recovery from the same period last year and an 88.
8 percent recovery from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Taiwan, the third-most-visiting country to Korea, sent some 423,477 visitors here as of the end of April this year. The figure is 7.
5 percent more than the same period in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S.
, the fourth-most-visiting country, received 367,700 visitors between January and April this year, 19.5 percent more than the 2019 pre-pandemic record high of 307,268 during the same period. Also, Indonesia and Singapore sent 68,795 and 100,648 visitors each, which are both some 10 percent more than the figures from the year before and showed a complete recovery from the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the numbers of visitors from neighboring China and Japan have yet to fully recover and stand at 78.1 percent and 82.5 percent, respectively, of their record highs from 2019.
However, the figures are recovering rapidly. Korea received some 1.42 million visitors from China.