Abstract
Hot springs development will be more activated with the five-day work week system than before. Nevertheless, investment and development achievement of hot springs has not resulted in a successful performance to foster townships, and this calls upon locals to build a guideline to develop hot springs. This study intends to analyze laws on hot springs, which influence mostly on the hot spring development, to gather up the information on the present state of the development, and to suggest considerations for further development plans. Features of the hot spring development are as follows: One is that metropolitan cities will discover hot spring resources more than small cities. Therefore the development will be twofold : one for resort tour and the other for one-day rest and recreation. In addition, Korean laws on hot springs are more site development-oriented to support tourism and recreation than to protect environment and discover unused resources. This makes hot spring development easier and efficient being supported by hot spring law, law on territory development and use, and tourism promotion law. On the other side, planned landscape trimming can be uniformized and unharmonized in terms of local identity and environment-friendliness. This is why careful considerations such as goods and bads of the local resources, local history and culture are needed in hot spring development. A long-term development project should include remodeling based on local identity and development trends. The third point indicates that Korean hot springs development has recorded relatively low performance due to difficult private capital attraction, and a high fence on land purchase and development approval. It is essential to release restrictions on the hot spring development-especially on those whose development performance has not been successful so that best practice can be supported by the government in remodeling and marketing. New plans on hot spring development should be also examined based on developer's capacity and local authorities' volition on the plan. Last point shows that most hot springs development plans have been designed only based on territory utilizing plan and facilities arrangement, not considering much on fund-raising, operational plan or feasibility analysis. Therefore the tourism promotion law should reinforce guidelines on tourist site approval system by supplementing criteria. At the same time, an education on tourism development planning is necessary to deepen developers' understanding, since most developers are experts more on city development, landscape architecture, designing, constructing and engineering than tourism development.