The KPop Demon Hunters’ Tourism Wave Is Just Getting Started

(Bloomberg) — Honolulu-based Christine Kim was early on the KPop Demon Hunters travel trend. To be fair, his trip to Seoul with his wife and kids was already on the books before the Netflix movie hits theaters in June 2025. The plan, at least initially, was to visit the grandparents. But then the film’s heroes, Rumi, Zoey and Mira, became the idols of her 5-year-old daughter, and the itinerary was rewritten in real time. The Kim couple’s family trip turned into the ultimate bragging rights as they visited a jimjilbang, or Korean spa, and the Namsan Tower, the location of the rival Saja Boys’ final show in the movie.

“My daughter seemed shocked to see that the locations in the movie were real,” Kim says via text. “He was so excited he was speechless.”

Her daughter wasn’t the only one embracing the cultural moment. “I bought a black hanbok and gat for my son [traditional clothing and hat] “And when we went to the Nike Store in Myeongdong, my daughter made a T-shirt with a magpie bird on it, after the KPop Demon Hunters character,” Kim recalls to be Saja Boy for Halloween.

As of late 2025, KPop Demon Hunters remained Netflix’s most-watched original film of all time, with over 500 million views. If you don’t have young children or have somehow managed to escape the phenomenon, the animated action-musical from Sony Pictures Animation follows K-pop girl group Huntrix as their chart-topping hits help them defeat the demons that threaten humanity.

As Korean-Canadian animator Maggie Kang recently told Bloomberg News’ Mishal Husain in a lengthy interview, if it’s a critical and commercial success that no one saw coming, it’s also now becoming a travel catalyst that no one saw coming. According to data from Trip.com, in the three months following the film’s release, global flight bookings to South Korea increased 25% compared to the same period the previous year; This may be the latest movie-induced travel obsession. (Statistics do not reveal travel motivations.)

After all, Korea was already rapidly developing as a destination among international tourists. But there is reason to believe that KPDH has at least something to do with this increase. The broader hallyu phenomenon, also referred to as the Korean Wave, has clearly resulted in an increase in the global popularity of Korean culture and its connections to tourism.

Boy band BTS has been the headliner of Hallyu since 2018, attracting hundreds of thousands of fans to Seoul for their concerts. He starred in best picture winner Parasite and streaming thriller Squid Game after their releases in 2019 and 2021; Girl group Blackpink has achieved similar international success. The popularity of Korean skincare and beauty videos consumed mostly on TikTok by Gen Z has also inspired many long-distance vacations. KPDH’s influence contributes to all of this.

According to the Seoul city government, 1.36 million international travelers visited the capital in July 2025, the month following the debut of the hit song Golden on Spotify, up 23.1% from the previous year. This sudden growth was attributed to tourists from China, Japan, Taiwan and the United States, with the government saying their trips were “fueled by the KPop Demon Hunters craze”; It’s a possible reflection of how the film broke out regionally before becoming a broader, international phenomenon in the United States and beyond.

This upward trend continued in subsequent months and helped South Korea reach a record-breaking 18.9 million foreign tourists in 2025, according to data from the country’s tourism board.

Given that awards season keeps the film fresh in audiences’ minds, this surge in tourism may outlast the film’s initial burst of popularity. On January 11, KPDH took home the Golden Globes for best animated feature and best original song; it also won best song written for visual media at the 2026 Grammys and swept the animation-centric Annie Awards with 10 out of a possible 10 wins. Now getting two Oscars on March 15 is highly appreciated. On March 12, Netflix confirmed that a sequel was in the works.

Considering that long-distance trips take time to plan and tourism trends and statistics are typically released quarterly or semi-annually, the ripples of KPDH’s influence in the travel space are just beginning to take shape.

Neil Hassall, who runs the South Korea Travel Tips and Planning Facebook group, says KPop Demon Hunters fans have boosted his group’s popularity in a way he hasn’t seen since at least Squid Game. It says it has 65,000 members in June 2025; By January 2026, this number had almost doubled to 120,000.

Bukchon Hanok Village in Seoul, where the traditional houses where the characters Rumi and Jinu meet for the first time, has emerged as a must-visit place not only for architecture and history enthusiasts. Fans of the film helped create the setting for one of the most popular Seoul tours on Trip.com. Searches for the National Museum of Korea on Trip.com since the film’s release have also increased 34% compared to last year, as fans flock to the museum’s gift shop to purchase movie merchandise.

Korean travel platform Creatrip, which helps international visitors book restaurants, K-beauty services and hanbok rentals, has also benefited from the popularity of KPop Demon Hunters. Bookings for jimjilbang and seshin services, two types of hammam scrubs seen in the film, increased 115% in the summer months after the film’s release compared to the spring months immediately preceding it. (It’s worth noting that spring and autumn are generally more popular for travelers to visit Korea than summer.) That number was only up 17% for the same months last year.

Medical clinics focusing on acupuncture, cupping and a type of herbal medicine called hanyak, which Rumi tried to use to heal her voice, increased by 409% in 2025 from the previous year, according to Creatrip.

Data from Berlin-based travel booking site Get Your Guide shows similar growth. Takao Nishina, the company’s regional manager for Japan and South Korea, says tour bookings for locations featured in the film, including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Sky Lotte World Tower, N Seoul Tower and Bukchon Hanok Village, increased by more than 350% in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Pop-up cafes, character meet-and-greets and other directly connected experiences in the Brooklyn-like neighborhood of Seongsu-dong are popping up to meet the moment. Kuala Lumpur-based doctor Irina Ishak took her family to one such KPDH pop-up in Seongsu-dong in December and counts it as one of the highlights of their trip.

“The kids know all the characters and moments in the movie,” Ishak says via text. “The pop-up featured three floors with character cutouts and photo-taking scenes in every corner. There were a few interactive corners, like using a torch to find a glow-in-the-dark Derpy cat print. The kids absolutely loved it.” View this post on Instagram

Creatrip CEO Haemin Yim believes the enthusiasm for KPop Demon Hunters is unlike anything Korea has seen in previous waves of hallyu-focused tourism. If people came for K-pop in the past, he says, their goals were to see concerts, visit K-pop group agencies and go to cafes on a “fandom-driven pilgrimage.” The interest this film generated for English speakers (travelers from the US, UK, Canada, and Australia) gave this wave much broader global attention and deeper engagement with aspects of Korean culture that extend far beyond singing and dancing.

“Every major cultural element in the film—hanbok, jimjilbang, gimbap, samgyetang, K-pop dance, traditional medicine—is something a tourist can book directly and experience in Korea. The film essentially functions as a 90-minute showcase of Korean daily life, but wrapped in a story that 500 million people have watched,” he says.

The set-jetting trend, in which people plan trips to places they see on screen, is prevalent to the point of causing overcrowding in some places. The Austrian town of Hallstatt has become the poster child for overtourism ever since families realized it was the real-life inspiration for the kingdom of Arendelle in Frozen. Disney’s Encanto has drawn more moderate tourism traffic to Colombia’s coffee region, which had previously been off the radar of many international travelers. View this post on Instagram

In Seoul, KPop Demon Hunters’ fandom has yet to fuel overtourism concerns and may never do so. While most movie- and television-inspired travelers focus their attention on a small number of highly recognizable locations, KPDH fans have countless ways to step into the devilishly cutting shoes of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey. The way the film has spread its fans across various sites and experiences may actually make it a poster child for what sustainable set jetting might look like.

Kim, a mother of two who lives in Honolulu, says the film was groundbreaking in other ways, too. “The artwork is beautiful, the music is great, and it filled a void,” he says. “There aren’t many movies with girl superheroes.”

(Updates on the growth of the Get Your Guide tour in paragraph 16 and winning prizes in paragraph 10.)

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