KTO to boost Korean DMZ’s tourism allure

dmz

PLANS are in place for South Korea to better position the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), its heavily fortified border with North Korea, as a tourist destination.

The Korea Tourism Organisation (KTO) hosted a one-day workshop last month near the border, telling travel trade attendees and government officials that it intends to organise new programmes for the DMZ.

Plans include turning the former US military base Camp Greaves into a tourist destination. Locations used in the filming of popular TV series Descendents of the Sun are also being earmarked as attractions.

Welcoming the move, Seo Tae-won, director of Seoul-based Suhyun Tour, said: “The DMZ is one of the most popular destinations for foreign visitors and hundreds of people go there every day.”

He added: “But at the moment, most of the existing tours are not very sophisticated. They are rather routine and mostly involve visitors getting aboard buses and going to observation points where they can look through binoculars into the north.”

Some tours do take tourists to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, where the two sides meet periodically for discussions, but most tours “lack true insight,” remarked Seo.

“We need to take them to new areas, away from the stretches of the DMZ that are closest to Seoul and show them the reality of the hostility and tension that exists between the North and South,” he said.

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