The Korea National Tourism Organization (KNTO) said Tuesday Chinese tourists to Korea outnumbered American tourists for the first time this year. The state tourism promotion body said Korea received a total of about 4.75 million foreign tourists this year. Among them, 46.8 percent or 2.22 million were Japanese. Chinese tourists were a distant second with 9.3 percent or 444,113 people of the total foreign visitors to Korea.
At the third place came tourists from the United States that numbered 395,963 or 8.3 percent of the total. The KNTO figures showed tourists from the Philippines accounted for 4.1 percent, Hong Kong 3.8 percent, Russia 2.6 percent and Taiwan 2.6 percent