Blue House to offer tour reservation websites in English, Japanese, Chinese next year

The government will open new websites for the Blue House tour reservation in English, Japanese and Chinese next year to provide better services for foreigners.

Foreigners visit the Blue House. [BAEK JONG HYUN]

The government will open new websites for the Blue House tour reservation in English, Japanese and Chinese next year to provide better services for foreigners.

English, Japanese and Chinese websites will be available early next year, and they will feature an email verification system for foreigners when making a reservation, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said.

The website renovation comes as a response to News1's report covering the difficulties foreigners experience while reserving a visit to the Blue House.

The current reservation system offers English service only on its main website and leads to Korean websites when you attempt to make a reservation.

Even for those who are familiar with the Korean language, the system's required phone number verification system makes the reservation process challenging for those who don't have a Korean phone number.

The upcoming website renovation follows the significant increase in foreign visitors to the former presidential residence since it was opened to the public in May 2022.

The Blue House saw 31,886 foreigners visit last year, while 108,458 visited this year from January to November, according to the Culture Ministry.

Foreigners accounted for 1.1 percent of all visitors to the Blue House in 2022. As of November, they accounted for 5.6 percent of all visitors this year, the Culture Ministry added.

The Blue House has been introducing measures to welcome more foreign visitors, such as distributing brochures in English, Japanese and Chinese.

It will also implement more improvements in the coming days, following the government's goal of attracting 20 million foreign tourist arrivals and generating $24.5 billion in tourism revenue by the end of 2024, which the government announced on Friday.

BY KIM JI-YE [kim.jiye@joongang.co.kr]