The KPop Demon Hunters’ tourism wave is just getting started

SEOUL – Honolulu-based Ms Christine Kim was early to the KPop Demon Hunters travel trend.

In fairness, her trip to Seoul with her husband and kids had been on the books before the Netflix film came out in June 2025. The plan, initially at least, was to visit grandparents.

But then Rumi, Zoey and Mira, the movie’s protagonists, became her five-year-old daughter’s idols, and the itinerary got rewritten in real time. When they visited a jjimjilbang, or South Korean spa, and the Namsan Tower, the setting for the rival Saja Boys’ final show in the movie, the Kims’ family trip turned into ultimate bragging rights. 

“My daughter seemed totally shocked that the places from the movie were real,” Ms Kim says via text. “She was so excited, she was speechless.” 

It was not just her daughter who bought into the cultural moment. “I bought my son a black hanbok and gat (traditional clothing and hat) so he could be a Saja Boy for Halloween,” she recalls. “And when we went to the Nike Store in Myeongdong, my daughter made a T-shirt with a magpie bird on it because of the KPop Demon Hunters character.” 

As at late 2025, KPop Demon Hunters remained Netflix’s most-watched original film with more than 500 million views. The animated action-musical produced by Sony Pictures Animation follows Huntrix, a K-pop girl group whose chart-topping hits help them take down demons that threaten humanity.  

A boost to tourism numbers

If it was the critical and commercial hit that nobody saw coming, as Korean-Canadian animator Maggie Kang recently told Bloomberg in a lengthy interview, it is also now becoming the travel catalyst that nobody saw coming.

According to data from Trip.com, in the three months after the movie’s release, global flight bookings to South Korea climbed 25 per cent year on year, in what could be the latest film-driven travel obsession. The stats do not tease out the motivations for travel.

After all, South Korea was already booming as a destination among international tourists. But there are reasons to believe the movie has at least something to do with the spike.

The broader Hallyu phenomenon, also referred to as the Korean Wave, has clearly driven the rising global popularity of South Korean culture and its connections to tourism.

Boy band BTS have been a Hallyu headliner since 2018, drawing hundreds of thousands of fans to Seoul for their concerts. Oscar Best Picture winner Parasite and streaming thriller Squid Game played a role after their debuts in 2019 and 2021; and girl group Blackpink have had similar international success.

The popularity of South Korean skincare and beauty videos, consumed mostly on TikTok by Gen Z, has also inspired plenty of long-haul vacations. KPop Demon Hunters’ influence adds to all of that. 

In July 2025, the month following the debut of the movie’s hit song Golden on Spotify, according to Seoul’s city government, 1.36 million international travellers visited the capital, 23.1 per cent more than the year before.

That immediate growth was attributed to tourists from China, Japan and the United States, with the government saying their trips were fuelled by the KPop Demon Hunters craze, a possible reflection of how the movie broke out regionally before becoming a broader, international phenomenon in the US and beyond.

This upward trend continued in the following months, helping South Korea achieve a record-breaking 18.9 million foreign tourists in 2025, according to data from its tourism board. 

That tourism spike may well outlast the movie’s initial burst of popularity, given that awards season is keeping it fresh in audiences’ minds. It won best song written for visual media at the Grammys on Feb 1. It added to its haul with two Oscars, for animated feature and original song, on March 15. 

On March 12, Netflix confirmed a sequel is in the works. 

Movie locations are now hot spots

Considering that long-haul trips take time to plan and tourism trends and statistics are often revealed on a quarterly or semi-annual basis, the ripples of KPop Demon Hunters’ influence in the travel sphere are just beginning to take shape. 

Mr Neil Hassall, who runs the Facebook group South Korea Travel Tips and Planning, says the movie’s fans have boosted the popularity of his group in a way he has not seen since Squid Game. In June 2025, he had 65,000 members, he says; by January 2026, that number had almost doubled to 120,000.

In Seoul, Bukchon Hanok Village – the neighbourhood of traditional homes where characters Rumi and Jinu meet for the first time – has emerged as a must-visit destination for more than just architecture and history buffs. The movie’s fans have helped make it the setting for one of the top trending Seoul tours on Trip.com.

Searches for the National Museum of Korea on Trip.com have increased 34 per cent year over year since the film’s release, as fans flock to its gift shop to buy movie merchandise.

Creatrip, a South Korean travel platform that helps international visitors book restaurants, K-beauty services and hanbok rentals, has also benefited from the popularity of KPop Demon Hunters.

Bookings for jjimjilbang and seshin services, two types of bathhouse scrubs seen in the movie, were up 115 per cent in the summer months after the movie’s release, compared with the spring months immediately before.

It is worth noting that spring and autumn are usually more popular times for travellers to visit South Korea than summer. During the same months the year before, they had grown by just 17 per cent.

Bookings for medical clinics focusing on acupuncture, cupping and a type of herbal medicine called hanyak – which Rumi tries to use to heal her voice – were up 409 per cent in 2025 compared with the year before, according to Creatrip. 

Pop-up cafes, character meet-and-greets in the Brooklyn-esque neighbourhood of Seongsu-dong and other directly tied experiences are springing up to meet the moment. 

Kuala Lumpur-based physician Irina Ishak took her family to one such KPop Demon Hunters pop-up in Seongsu-dong in December, and considers it a highlight of their trip.

“The kids know all the characters and moments in the movie,” she says via text. “The pop-up was three floors with character cutouts and scenes to take a picture at each corner. There were a few interactive corners like finding a glow-in-a-dark Derpy cat print using a torch. The kids absolutely loved it.” 

Deeper engagement with South Korean culture

Creatrip chief executive Yim Haemin believes the KPop Demon Hunters fervour is unlike anything South Korea has seen in previous Hallyu-driven tourism waves. In the past, if people were coming for K-pop, she says, their goal was to see concerts, visit K-pop group agencies and go to cafes for fandom-driven pilgrimage.

The appeal this film has had for English speakers – travellers from the US, Britain, Canada and Australia – has given this wave much broader global traction and deeper engagement with aspects of South Korean culture that stretch well beyond singing and dancing. 

“Every major cultural element in the film – hanbok, jjimjilbang, gimbap, samgyetang, K-pop dance, traditional medicine – is something a tourist can book and experience in South Korea. The film essentially functions as a 90-minute showcase of South Korean daily life, except it’s wrapped in a story that 500 million people watched,” says Ms Yim. 

Set-jetting, the trend in which people plan trips to places they have seen on-screen, has been dominant elsewhere, to the point of causing overcrowding in some places. 

Hallstatt, Austria, has become an overtourism poster child since families realised it was the inspiration for the kingdom of Arendelle in the Frozen movies (2013 to present). And Disney’s Encanto (2021) has driven more moderate tourism traffic to Colombia’s coffee region, a place far off the radar for many international travellers beforehand.

In Seoul, KPop Demon Hunters’ fandom has not yet stoked concerns of overtourism, and it may never do so.

Whereas most film- and television-inspired travellers focus their attention on a small number of highly recognisable locations, fans of the movie have myriad ways to step into Rumi, Mira and Zoey’s demon-slashing shoes. The way in which the film is spreading fans out to a variety of sites and experiences may in fact make it a poster child for what sustainable set-jetting could look like. 

Ms Kim, the Honolulu-based mum of two, says the movie is also trailblazing in other ways. “The artwork is beautiful, the music is great and it filled a void,” she says. “There aren’t a lot of movies with girl superheroes.” BLOOMBERG