The massive influx of foreign tourists into Korea since 2008 has made the landscapes of Seoul’s uptown streets, the capital city of Korea, more crowed but perky than before. However, such rapid growth of international tourists brings about the shortage problem of proper accommodation facilities in the mega city. 

The study begins with a notion that the problem of tourist accommodations in Seoul comes from an unbalanced accommodation supply which was caused by a biased investments and this is a kind of policy failure. Actually, tourists demand more and more economy class of accommodations than expensive luxury tourists only for few nights. However, the tourist accommodation facilities in Seoul are concentrated on first or luxury hotels. The purpose of this study, thus, is to find a way of restructuring the current tourist accommodation system of Korea which is very unique and complicated and to expand more middle and low priced accommodation facilities which is rare comparing with the luxury ones. For these, this study analyzed fundamental reasons of tourist accommodations, the problems of Korean  accommo- dation system and their associated with legal system, and the possibility of unifying those accommodations which are currently separated by different laws and policies.  

This study suggests a new idea for fundamental solution that those four different types of accommodations should be merged into two in the name of ‘tourist accommodation’ or ‘hotel’ for efficient management of those facilities. This idea should be followed by the substantial revision of current ‘tourist hotels classification system’ which has appled to only tourist hotels and acted as a big barrier between the tourist hotels and other accommodations. This barrier should be removed in terms of relaxing of problematic regulations. As a result of this sugges- tion, it is estimated that approximately 15.5 thousand rooms from existing accommodation facilities would be added to the new tourist accommodation system.