The Korea Tourism Organisation’s website, recorded the most traffic of all tourism organization websites in 2005.Early this year, the KTO’s website—www.tour2korea.com—placed somewhere around 9,000 among national tourism organization websites, but through continued promotional online marketing and events, the website began seeing a steady increase in its number of visitors.

Finally on Dec. 28, tour2korea.com replaced the Hong Kong Tourism Board’s website as the world’s most heavily visited tourism organization website, according to Alexa, an Internet traffic research company.

Tour2Korea went online in 2001 and plays an important role in tourism marketing by providing a wide variety of information on Korea.

It is available in English, Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Korean.

The site offers up-to-date information on Korea’s climate, culture, transportation, food, the Korean Wave (Hallyu), Korean language, and more.

The KTO’s active international online marketing and the Korean Wave created a synergistic effect, and tour2korea.com secured approximately 600,000 members, and the average number of daily visitors reached more than 52,000.

The total number of foreign visitors to Korea is expected to reach 6,000,000 in 2005, exceeding the 5,240,000 foreign visitors that came in 2002 when the World Cup was held in Korea.

Active international online marketing activities through tour2korea have made significant contributions to these results.

According to the T2K promotion manager, “The Korean Wave in 2005 is more powerful than any other year, and KTO will continue to focus its efforts on promoting it, related commercial products, and international online marketing to expand the interest in Korea worldwide.”
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