SOUTH KOREA. Over 100,000 people packed into the 25th Lotte Duty Free Family Festival held at Jamsil Stadium, Seoul on Friday and Saturday.
The music festival featured some of K-Pop’s hottest stars, including Psy, Kim Gun-mo, Twice, Lee Juck, K Will and Mamamoo.
The event was a welcome fillip to Lotte Duty Free after the recent slump in Chinese tourism caused by the THAAD anti-missile system dispute between South Korea and China. The concert celebrated Lotte Group’s 50th anniversary and the recent re-opening of Lotte Duty Free World Tower in Seoul.
Despite the political problems that have beset Korea’s tourism sector, some 1,000 VIP customers from Southeast Asia, Japan and China attended the event.
Besides the ‘Hallyu (Korean wave) Star Concert’, Lotte Duty Free also featured its popular in-house animated characters, ‘Tanki’s Family’, displaying and selling various products.
The Lotte Duty Free Family Festival is Korea’s leading Hallyu (Korean wave) marketing event. Lotte Duty Free CEO Jang Sun-wook said, “In order to revitalise the Korean tourism industry, the Lotte Duty Free Family Festival was held this year to continue promoting the Korean Wave that is such a great asset of Korea tourism. I will continue to pursue various projects that can contribute to tourism’s revitalisation.”
As reported, South Korean tourism and travel retail executives are hopeful that the election of new Korean President Moon Jae-in on 9 May will lead to a rapid improvement in relations with China. Before the election, President Moon pledged a much softer line on THAAD and on relations with North Korea than his predecessor, the now disgraced Park Geun-hye.
Chinese arrivals to South Korea collapsed -40% in March, largely because of a ban on group tours imposed by the Chinese authorities on 15 March.
