"Maybe I'll just go to Japan," they'll say... Why are foreign visitors to Korea "flooding with complaints"? [2026 National Assembly Audit]

South Korea Travel Hits a Wall at “Login”... Posts Citing Inconveniences 1.6 Times as Common as in Japan

Tourism Inconveniences for Foreign Visitors Raised at Parliamentary Audit... 11% in South Korea, 7% in Japan
Digital hurdles such as identity verification and payments dominate in South Korea; transportation, sightseeing and dining in Japan
“Attitude and hospitality” toward foreign visitors records the strongest negative sentiment, at 0.78
Kim Yoon-deok: “The era of 30 million visitors to Korea must begin with resolving tourists’ inconveniences”

In South Korea, tourists can install apps to reserve restaurants or buy train tickets, only to get stuck at the mobile phone identity verification or payment stage. In Japan, they are inconvenienced by complicated public transit transfers and long waits at tourist attractions. These findings come from a comparison of online accounts by foreign tourists who visited South Korea and Japan. The share of posts mentioning travel-related inconveniences was about 1.6 times higher for South Korea than for Japan.

Foreign tourists visiting Myeongdong in Jung-gu, Seoul, look around the area. Yonhap News.

On October 23, Kim Yoon-deok, a lawmaker from the Democratic Party of Korea and a member of the National Assembly’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee, presented these findings on tourism-related inconveniences and called for improvements across government during a comprehensive audit of state administration involving the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and other agencies.

The data released by Kim came from a report published in April by Yanolja Research, a tourism industry research institute. Titled “A Structural Diagnosis of Inconveniences Experienced by Visitors to Korea: A Korea-Japan Comparison Based on Reddit Social Data,” the report analyzed English-language posts about travel in South Korea and Japan on the global online community Reddit over three years, from January 2023 to December 2025.

The researchers collected posts containing expressions of negative experiences and divided them into paragraphs, compiling a total of 7,260 items for analysis: 3,480 about South Korea and 3,780 about Japan. The results showed that posts describing inconveniences accounted for about 11% of those about South Korea, compared with about 7% of those about Japan.

The difference between the two countries was even more pronounced in the areas where inconveniences arose. For travel in South Korea, digital services ranked first, accounting for 27.8% of reported inconveniences. They were followed by tourism information and guidance (16.4%), transportation (13.1%) and payments (12.0%). The four leading categories made up 69.3% of all reported inconveniences.

More specifically, inconveniences were concentrated in app registration and identity verification (13.1%), payment methods (11.5%), digital service errors (10.4%), directions and navigation (10.3%), and transit payments and reloading (6.3%), in that order.

Foreign tourists cited registration processes requiring a South Korean mobile phone number, overseas-issued credit cards being declined, and restrictions on accessing apps using foreign IP addresses as major problems. The analysis also identified cases in which tourists were unable to proceed past the payment stage when booking train tickets, or struggled to find their way because English place names in map apps did not match actual addresses.

In Japan, by contrast, transportation-related inconveniences were the most common, at 23.0%, followed by sightseeing and activities (15.9%), dining (12.8%) and digital services (11.5%). Problems arising during actual travel and stays, such as complicated public transit transfers, access to tourist attractions and restaurant use, were relatively prominent.

The researchers characterized the difference as South Korea’s “digital entry barriers” versus Japan’s “user fatigue.” Their analysis found that in South Korea, inconveniences tend to center on verification and payment before people can begin using a service, while in Japan, they accumulate during travel and sightseeing.

The two countries also differed in the intensity of negative emotions, not just the frequency of inconveniences. Using VADER, a method for quantifying sentiment in online text, the researchers found that negative sentiment about travel in South Korea was high in the social and cultural category (0.61), digital services (0.52) and transportation (0.48).

In particular, the negative sentiment score for “attitude and hospitality” toward foreign visitors was 0.78, the highest among all subcategories in both countries. A score closer to 1 on the negative sentiment index indicates stronger negative emotions expressed.

Typical experiences included receiving unfriendly looks because they were foreigners, being denied entry to some establishments because of communication difficulties, and being refused taxi rides. Attitude and hospitality accounted for a relatively small 4.1% of inconveniences reported in South Korea, but the intensity of negative emotions was the highest.

Based on these findings, Yanolja Research recommended improving the procedures foreign tourists must go through to use tourism services in South Korea. Its proposals included improving multilingual interfaces and access from overseas, as well as expanding passport-based identity verification and integration with global payment networks.

Improvement measures have already begun in some areas. Since March, the Seoul Metropolitan Government has allowed visitors to use overseas-issued credit cards at new ticket machines in subway stations across the city to buy short-term Climate Cards and single-journey tickets. In June, Naver also introduced a feature that lets foreign visitors use map reservations and ordering and payment services after verifying their identity with a passport, without a domestic mobile phone number.

In February, the government conditionally approved Google’s request to transfer high-precision map data from South Korea to overseas locations. However, Google Maps’ walking and driving directions in South Korea have not yet been fully restored, and improving the related services remains an ongoing task.

“Tourists visit Korea expecting to see a dynamic, sophisticated and warm-hearted country through K-dramas, but if they feel unwelcome and experience alienation and humiliation on the ground, that could lead to extreme anti-Korean sentiment,” Kim said, expressing concern.

He added, “The era of 30 million visitors to Korea begins with making travel convenient for foreign tourists,” and called for the government to address tourists’ inconveniences through bodies such as the National Tourism Strategy Meeting and develop measures for rapid, government-wide improvements.

The findings highlight the need for domestic tourism policy, which has focused on attracting visitors, to also assess convenience and access to services throughout the actual travel experience. According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, 17.11 million foreign visitors came to South Korea through September this year, up 21.5% from the same period a year earlier. As visitor numbers continue to rise, improving digital services designed primarily for domestic users and the environment for serving foreign visitors has emerged as a challenge for the country’s future tourism competitiveness.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.