Hyundai Asan, the South Korean organizer of package tours to North Korea’s Mt. Kumgang, has seen the fees it pays to Pyongyang increase a whopping 200 percent from 2004.

According to Unification Ministry reports, Hyundai Asan raised the fee on one-day trips by 100 percent from fifteen U.S. dollars to thirty dollars in July. The fee on one-night, two-day trips jumped 37 percent from thirty-five dollars to forty-eight dollars. The fee on trips longer than two nights and three days increased 14 percent from seventy dollars to eighty dollars.

The one-day trip fee skyrocketed 200 percent from July 2004, the one-night, two-day trip fee 92 percent and the two-night, three-day trip fee 60 percent.

A Unification Ministry official said that the fees were raised in consideration of five-million dollars unpaid to North Korea during a halt of the tourism project until March last year. Hyundai Asan agreed in 1998 to pay nine-hundred-forty-two million dollars in fees to Pyongyang over seventy five months.