Hallyu tourism: impacts on inbound tourists to South Korea

Hallyu tourism has emerged as a theme for tourism research. Generally, existing studies just define Hallyu as the popular culture of South Korea (hereafter Korea) and then explain how Hallyu helps attract inbound tourists to Korea. There is no clear definition for Hallyu tourism. This research letter intends to close this gap by providing an illustration of Hallyu tourism as the amalgamation of film tourism, celebrity-induced tourism, food tourism and culture tourism. Existing studies related to the impacts of Hallyu on inbound tourists to Korea usually use questionnaire for data collection. To contribute to the literature, this paper empirically examines the impacts of Hallyu on inbound tourists to Korea with time-series data. The long-run relationship between Hallyu and inbound tourists to Korea is examined. This paper uses the exports of the content industry of Korea as the proxy for the expansion of Hallyu. To capture the mentioned long-run relationship, cointegration analysis taking into account of small sample size with only 15 annual observations is utilized. The findings conclude that Hallyu attracts inbound tourists and inbound tourists from Asia to Korea.