I am working in the travel industry for a company called Travel Korea, and specifically in marketing for them. Adventure Korea is a tour company that focuses on giving customers a customized experience of adventure, fun, and education around South Korea. After being founded in 2001, Adventure Korea has been in business for over 20 years and received the presidential award in 2023 for boosting tourism to rural villages. In general, they offer tours and experiences all over South Korea, along with tours to North Korea and other countries upon request. Most of the programs rely heavily on adventurous activities and the outdoors, offering experiences such as paragliding, rafting, zip lining, and many more. Building upon the outdoors and adventurous activities, they include cultural experiences in most of their programs, with some having it as a main focus.

The travel industry is centered around people and experiences. At Travel Korea, that means helping clients discover what makes South Korea special, from cultural experiences like visiting an ancient palace to an outdoor adventure tour where you are paragliding and white water rafting. Adventure Korea doesn’t just sell trips, they sell moments that people will remember for a lifetime, as well as experiences that they will learn life lessons from. I have seen firsthand how the team at Travel Korea puts careful thought into planning itineraries, booking transportation and accommodations, and responding to a wide variety of customer needs. They offer a wide variety of Tours that target many different audiences. And targeting those audiences within one company can be a difficult task. 

So, to be successful in the Travel industry, or rather specifically Travel Korea, you have to have a few essential skills. The first being Creativity, this is because to be able to reach the different target markets, you need to come up with different ways to reach them. For example, you can’t assume that an Instagram post about paragliding is going to be enticing for a school trip tour. And because Adventure Korea targets both people seeking adventure in their individual travels, they also target schools for educational trips and companies for team-building retreats. So, as a marketing intern, I need to be creative in how I will try and reach the target markets, whether this is posting multiple times to target the groups individually or trying to get one post to reach all of the target markets, and figuring out what that would look like.  

The second skill you need is to be adaptable so that you can match the needs of any tour and market to anything at a given notice. Adventure Korea is always developing new tours and also developing new ways to reach the markets that they want to reach. So to be able to be successful in this environment, you have to be open-minded and accept change at a moment’s notice. That goes along with the season, too, in the long run. Different tours operate at different times, for example cherry blossom season. Cherry blossom tours wouldn’t take place in the middle of winter when they don’t blo, om but you also need to be aware of when people are looking for cherry blossom tours and that might be in the winter because they are longing for spring and want to plan a trip to korea for that time. So getting into that mentality is a necessary skill for someone who wants to work in travel and especially travel marketing. 

Lastly, something that is necessary for this industry, which is unique to Korea, is environmental awareness and consciousness. In Korea, recycling and taking care of the environment a very important aspects of their society. And though that is known, many foreigners do not fully comprehend this and can still make mistakes when it comes to recycling systems and keeping nature clean. Along with that, tours create a lot of waste and also waste a lot of resources like gas on a tour bus. One of AdventureKorea’s goals as a company is to work with ESG in mind, which means Environmental, Social, Governance. And it is a way to assess the sustainability and environmental impacts of a company. Adventure Korea wants to cut down on their impact on nature and instead help improve it by offering many ESG Programs where tourists can help efforts to clean up South Korea with Programs that investigate microplastics, and programs where they help clean cities. This is something that I have never seen the lengths gone to before for a company to be environmentally friendly and ensure the impact they are leaving on the environment is a positive one.