Methodology — The Travel Infrastructure Index

Source: 2025 International Visitor Survey — Satisfaction with tourism infrastructure (국가승인통계 제314002호) — Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism / Korea Culture & Tourism Institute, published at know.tour.go.kr. Licence: 공공누리 제1유형 (출처표시) — 문화체육관광부 국가승인통계. Survey year: 2025. Retrieved: 2026-09-05.
What this measures: Foreign visitors to Korea were asked how satisfied they were with each part of their trip, on a five-point scale. The ranked figure is the share answering “satisfied” or “very satisfied” (top-two box); the smaller number beside it is the mean on the same five-point scale. The items are every option in the survey question — we neither picked nor dropped any.
How the numbers were read — this index differs: Our other official-statistics indexes compute their figures from machine-readable source data. This one’s source is a statistical table inside a 585-page report PDF, so a person read it across once by hand. The data file records which tables the figures came from, and the build fails if the transcribed values break ordering, ranking or range. Transcription error is still more likely here than with a script, which is why the source URL above is left intact for checking against the original tables.
Update cadence: Annual. The confirmed report appears around May of the following year, which is why 2025 is the most recent data that can exist right now.

Limits worth knowing before you cite this

This is satisfaction, not quality. Satisfaction is measured against expectation. An item people expected little from can score high, and the reverse also happens.
The spread is narrow — the middle ranks are effectively tied. Ten of the eleven items sit above 87%. Allowing for sampling error, the real content of this table is that language communication stands apart, not that one item beat another by a place.
Respondents are people who came. Nobody who decided against the trip is in this sample. If infrastructure ever put someone off visiting, this survey cannot see it.
Three items have a different denominator. Tourist information services, mobile and internet access, and digital tourism information exclude “not applicable” answers — they are satisfaction among people who used them.

These eleven items were the Culture Shock Index’s items for one day, on 5 September 2026. Satisfaction is a judgement about something you already expected, which is a different axis from being caught off guard, so they moved here, where the name matches what the numbers say.