One year into a marketing tie-up with Agoda, Busan has some numbers worth talking about. Between April and August 2026, searches for the South Korean port city on the booking platform jumped 77% compared with the four months before the campaign launched. More striking: of the travellers who booked Busan through the campaign, 40% had never been to South Korea at all, and another 28% were Korea repeaters discovering Busan for the first time. That's incremental demand — people who would otherwise have gone to Seoul, or skipped Korea entirely.
Taiwan, Japan and China supplied most of those bookings. The city itself counted roughly 3.43 million international arrivals through August 2026, part of a national push that treats tourism as a core strategic industry and targets 30 million foreign visitors a year by 2029.
The partnership, formalised in an October 2025 memorandum of understanding, made Agoda Busan's data and technology partner for inbound tourism. Busan also became the first destination on Agoda's Flagship programme — a dedicated destination-marketing product that bundles a city's own tourism assets into a permanent campaign on the platform. City officials and local hoteliers have endorsed the model, and Agoda is openly pitching it as a template for other Asian cities.
The milestone was marked at the 2nd Global City Tourism Summit, hosted in Busan from 26 to 28 October, with the city's tourism organisations, South Korea's culture ministry and UN Tourism all involved. Mayor Jeon Jae-soo framed the city's goal plainly: less volume-driven growth, more value-driven — visitors who stay longer, spend more and spread out beyond the usual districts into the city's eastern and western neighbourhoods.
For travellers, the takeaway is practical. Busan is having a moment, and it's still cheaper and less crowded than Seoul. Campaign-style promotions mean real deals on accommodation, and the city is actively investing in the kind of infrastructure — longer stays, more to do across more districts — that makes a multi-day visit easy: Haeundae and Gwangalli beaches, the Gamcheon culture village, Jagalchi fish market, and hillside neighbourhoods that most first-timers still skip.
