Cruise ship from China to visit S.Korea's Jeju Island on Aug. 31

Reservations for cruise ships visiting South Korea's Jeju Island are flooding in amid China's resumption of all group tours to its neighboring country.

"The shipping companies of several cruise ships sent me emails asking for reservations for visits to Jeju today,” a Jeju official on Monday said. "We've been swamped with requests for allocating berths."

As soon as China on Thursday allowed group tours to South Korea to resume, 53 Chinese cruise ships booked visits to Jeju in a day. 

This year, 15 vessels will depart from China for Jeju: one this month, five next month, one in October and eight in December.

Next year, 38 such ships through March have allotted berths at the Port of Jeju and Seogwipo Gangjeong Cruise Port Terminal.

Thus reservations accepted now are for after March.

First, a 25,000-ton-class cruise ship on August 31 will stop by Jeju.

The cruise ship operator is known to plan to recruit over 1,000 Chinese group tourists in just 20 days by August 31 after making its reservation for Jeju.

When the vessel from China arrives in Jeju, it will be the first in six years to do so since such ships were banned due to the 2017 row over South Korea's installation of the U.S. missile defense system Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, aka THADD.

In 2016, Jeju saw its cruise tourist peak of 1.2 million, most of them from China. Thus Chinese group tours drove the cruise tourism market.

China's ban on such vessels from going to Jeju in 2017 due to THADD led to a drought of Chinese tourists for over six years. From August 31, 15,000 to 20,000 of them are expected to visit the island over four months through the end of the year.

Write to Hun-Hyoung Ha at hhh@hankyung.com