Abstract
Seoul is entering an era of 20 million tourists, which has been driven by the widespread adoption of five-day workweek and the ever-increasing foreign tourists seeking for personal experience of Korean culture. This is the right time in this sense to bring some changes into the modern hotel rooms, since they are the very front lines that the Korean traditions can be disseminated along. This study attempts to extract traditional expressive factors residing in guest rooms and to suggest the modernization methods applicable to Seoul five-star hotel rooms through an in-depth study on how the traditional factors can be expressed effectively in modern fashion. This study unfolds its attempt as follows: The factors that can express traditional aspects in guest rooms are extracted first, and the standard analytic tools are set up using the modernization method of traditional factors, such as reproduction, alteration and reinterpretation of original forms. Adopting those standard tools from the modernization method of traditional factors the guest rooms of hotels in Korea, China, and Japan are examined comparatively, and the patterns in expressing the traditional factors are analyzed for all sample hotels. Finally, based upon these we propose some guidelines and data necessary for the effective modernized representation of traditional factors, which can be applicable to domestic hotels.