Since 2002 Jeju has operated a separate visa regime: most nationalities can enter the island for up to 30 days without a Korean visa, provided they stay on Jeju. It is the most liberal island-access regime in Northeast Asia — and it made Jeju the default experiment for Korean tourism policy.
The regime underwrote Jeju’s Chinese boom of the 2010s: direct flights from dozens of mainland cities, duty-free volumes that rivalled Seoul, and a hotel pipeline calibrated to group tourism. When Chinese group travel halted in 2017 over the THAAD dispute, Jeju discovered the other side of the dial: access-driven demand can be switched off from outside.
Today the gateway works differently: Chinese flows are recovering selectively, Southeast Asian source markets are growing, and the island’s casino resorts depend on the regime entirely — the foreigner-only gaming floors are, legally, a visa-policy product. The desk reads Jeju’s visa announcements as rate forecasts: every regime loosening has historically repriced the island’s top hotels within two seasons.
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