Methodology — The Destinations Index
- Source
- KTO Tourism Data Lab — regional visitor estimates (mobile big data) (한국관광공사 빅데이터 지역별 방문자수) — regional visitor estimates published by the Korea Tourism Organization (한국관광공사) through the open data portal. Year: 2025. Retrieved 2026-08-29.
- How the ranking works
- Daily estimates are summed across the year per region, separately for foreign visitors and for Koreans visiting from other regions. Residents moving inside their own region are excluded — that is daily life, not a visit.
- Update cadence
- Daily at the source; we refresh annually with the completed year.
Limits worth knowing before you cite this
- These are model estimates, not counts. The source infers visits from mobile-carrier signals using KTO’s methodology. It is the best available proxy for “where people go”, but it is an estimate, and we did not build the model.
- A visit-day is not a person. Someone touring three provinces in a week counts in all three; a region on the way to somewhere else picks up pass-through signal.
- Regions are provinces, not places. “Gyeonggi” spans suburbs, mountains and an international airport’s commuter belt — for named places with actual gates, see the Attractions Index.