The Impact of Foreign Exchange Rates on International Travel: The Case of South Korea

Purpose - The objective of the paper is to explain both the price sensitivity of international tourists to South Korea and the price sensitivity of Korean tourists to international travel. The study examines long-run equilibrium relationships and Granger causal relationships between foreign exchange rates and inbound and outbound tourism demand in South Korea. Research design/ data / methodology - The study employs monthly time series data from January 1990 to September 2010. The paper examines the long-run equilibrium relationship using the Johansen cointegration test approach after unit root tests. The short-run Granger causality was tested using the vector error correction model with the Wald test. Results - Hypothesis 1 testing whether there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between exchange rates, inbound and outbound tourism demand is supported. Hypothesis 2 testing whether exchange rates lead to a change in touristarrivals and expenditure is not supported. Hypothesis 3 testing whether exchange rates lead to a change in tourist departures and expenditure is supported. Conclusions - The findings of this study show that the impacts of tourism price competitiveness are changing quite significantly with regard to destination competitiveness. In other words, the elasticity of tourism price over tourism demand has been moderated.