Seoul has popular tourism storytelling attractions. Currently, the most popular example of those is the campus of Ewha Womans University in Shinchon area where the pronunciation of the school’s name seems to be heard as the meaning of giving profit in Chinese and so many chinese tourists flock there to take photos for their fortune. Another example is Joongang High School in Bukchon area which was a setting of a famous Korean soup opera, Winter Sonata, and became a popular tourist destination especially for Japanese women tourists. Those sites have been representatives of tourism storytelling resources in Seoul. This kind of tourism storytelling resource can attract many tourists only with a story related to the place or object itself.
Given such opportunities, Seoul Metropolitan Government has tried to promote its tourism marketing through the storytelling approach. However, the policy has been launched in lack of elaborate and systematic study, which would have a limited effect.
The main purpose of this study is to make up the current Seoul’s tourism storytelling policy and projects. For that, this study firstly defined what is tourism storytelling, analyzed successful tourism storytelling examples over the world as well as domestic ones, and digged out what made them be so famous and popular tourism attractions. During the process, the study found that tourism storytelling basically requires interesting and context of the story for tourists to be able to feel sincerity. Meanwhile, those tourism storytelling examples could be classified with four different types by a new typology. This new typology for tourism storytelling resources is determined by the combination of story and the story’s object, regarding whether or not the story is real and whether the resource is an existing tourism attraction before the story is added to it, which means enhancement of its current tourism value by the story, or it becomes a tourism attraction by the story, which means creation of a new tourist attraction.
As a result, this new storytelling typology produces four types of tourism storytelling cases including A-type(create a tourist attraction with fictitious story), B-type(enhance an existing attraction by fictitious story), C-type(create a tourist attraction with non-fiction story), D-type(enhance an existing tourist attraction by non-fiction story). Upon the tourism storytelling types, this study analyzed many examples over the world and found some core successful factors corresponding to each type.
With those analytical framework, current Seoul’s tourism storytelling resources which were unveiled last year was evaluated in terms of potential and the core successful factors. As a result, a module for marketing strategies for the types considering the strategies of choice, concentration, and differentiation was proposed to promote those tourism storytelling resources for enhancing Seoul’s tourism attractiveness.
Finally, this study suggested policy implications for successful tourism storytelling project of Seoul as follows: re-establishing the purpose and target for the tourism storytelling project, diversifying the contents of tourism storytelling subjects, getting feedback for better completion and effect of the works which were done last year, and continuing next projects with more systematic and elaborate planning.