[Yonhap Photo]
China's tourism authorities decided to partially lift its bans on group tours to South Korea, sources said, as Seoul and Beijing move to repair bilateral relations badly frayed by the deployment of a U.S. defense system in South Korea.
At meetings earlier in the day, China's National Tourism Administration made a decision to allow offline tourist agencies in Beijing and Shandong Province to sell package tours to South Korea, the industry sources said.
"It means (China) will lift bans on Korean tours region-by-region in a step-by-step manner, having not lifted them on regions outside of Beijing and Shandong," a source said.
Still, the tourism body reportedly required the tour packages not to include visits to affiliates of Lotte Group, such as its hotels and duty-free shops. South Korea's fifth-largest conglomerate is one of the companies most affected by Beijing's economic retaliation due to its signing of a land-swap deal with the Seoul government to host the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.
The latest decision by the Chinese authorities came after the two countries agreed on Oct. 31 to put their feud of more than a year over the deployment behind them.
(Yonhap)
reporter
Lim Chang-won
cwlim34@ajunews.com
