Lotte Duty Free has launched a dedicated and successful road show in Shanghai to reassure Chinese tourists that South Korea is now safe to visit and completely free of the MERS virus. This is also part of an effort to bring 4.5m Chinese tourists to the country in line with government policy.

 

Hong-Kyun Lee, President of Lotte Duty Free (top right) organised and headed up the press conference and road show, inviting local travel agencies and the media last Tuesday (September 8).

 

Lotte reports that around 100 representatives from 70 Chinese local media groups, including the Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily, Shanghai Morning Post and power bloggers attended the press conference. In addition, 200 people from 180 local travel agencies attended the road show.

 

The Lotte Duty Free President also worked side by side with Lotte Hotel and Lotte World Adventure to reinforce the tourism image of South Korea, while also underlining and promoting the tourism competencies of the Lotte Group’s three tourism companies as a whole. The ongoing plan now is to take the road show to Tokyo this month and to Thailand in October.

 

 

The worthy endeavour coincides with sales at Lotte Duty Free shops increasing by 15.6% last week compared to the same period last year, which the company says is the first rebound to be recorded by the retailer since the MERS virus broke out in the country last June.

 

Prior to this, Lotte said it endured no less than 14 weeks of negative growth after the virus was first identified in the second week of June 2015.

 

Meanwhile, the retailer says it is involving itself in multiple activities to stimulate Chinese tourism to South Korea, including inviting Chinese travel agencies, reporters and ‘power bloggers’ to both Seoul and Jeju, while supporting inbound travel packages to Korea, but also constantly attracted the Chinese visitors.

 

It has also held several special events, including a Family Concert with K-wave stars, the Night Party in Lotte World, plus a ‘giveaway event’ where it even offered some lucky attendees new cars.

 

Commenting on the effort, Hong-Kyun Lee, President of Lotte Duty Free said: “Each of the three tourism companies of Lotte Group will make the best of its ability to provide the best services that Chinese tourists will be satisfied with and based on the several overseas offices, we will try our best to closely cooperate with the Chinese travel agencies and to invite the Chinese tourists, so that we contribute to the development of the tourism in Korea.”

 

 

During the visit to Shanghai, Lotte Duty Free also introduced Korea’s excellent tourism attractions and its global-scale shopping infrastructure to the local Chinese entrepreneurs who work in tourism industry, plus the press and power bloggers by inviting them to Seoul and Jeju Island on two separate occasions last July.

 

Next month (October), the retailer plans to sign a business agreement with the Tourism Promotion Organization for Asia Pacific Cities (TPO) to actively support promotions for the tourism industry in Korea. TPO is an international tourism promotion organization that is composed of 112 member organizations.

 

The company adds that since 2013 it has held 17 road shows abroad in countries, which include China, Japan, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan in cooperation with Lotte Hotel and Lotte World Adventure.

 

It adds that these efforts helped bring some 3,370,000 Chinese tourists to Korea. Lotte points out that this number is more than half of the total 6m Chinese tourists that visit the country each year. It adds that Lotte Duty Free alone brought 1,550,000 tourists through its overseas offices – or 10.8% of the total number of foreigners visiting Korea last year.

 

 [Top image: Hong-Kyun Lee, President of Lotte Duty Free at the press conference].