The K-Pop Demon Hunters’ tourism wave is just getting started

SEOUL – Honolulu-based Christine Kim was early on the K-Pop Demon Hunters travel trend. In fairness, her trip to Seoul with her husband and kids was already 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 5-year-old daughter’s idols, and the itinerary got rewritten in real time. When they visited a jimjilbang, or Korean spa, and the Namsan Tower, the setting for the rival Saja Boys’s final show in the movie, the Kims’ family trip turned into the ultimate bragging rights. 

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

It wasn’t 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,” Kim recalls. “And when we went to the Nike Store at Myeongdong, my daughter made a T-shirt with a magpie bird on it because of the K-Pop Demon Hunters character.” 

As of late 2025, K-Pop Demon Hunters remained Netflix’s most-watched original film of all time with more than 500 million views. In case you don’t have small children or somehow managed to escape the phenomenon, 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.  

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’s 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 over the same period the year before, in what could be the latest film-driven travel obsession. The stats don’t tease out the motivations for travel.

After all, Korea was already booming as a destination among international tourists. But there are reasons to believe that KPDH 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 Korean culture and its connections to tourism.

Boy-band BTS has been a hallyu headliner since 2018, drawing hundreds of thousands of fans to Seoul for its concerts. Best picture winner Parasite and streaming thriller Squid Game played a role after their debuts in 2019 and 2021; girl-band Blackpink has had similar international success. The popularity of Korean skin-care and beauty videos, consumed mostly on TikTok by Generation Z, has also inspired plenty of long-haul vacations. KPDH’s influence adds to all of that. 

In July 2025, the month following the debut of the hit song Golden on Spotify, according to Seoul’s city government, 1.36 million international travelers visited the capital city, 23.1% more than the year before. That immediate growth was attributed to tourists from China, Japan, Taiwan and the US, with the government saying their trips were “fueled by the K-Pop 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 the country’s 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. On Jan 11, KPDH took home Golden Globes in the categories of best animated motion picture and best original song in a motion picture; it also won best song written for visual media at the 2026 Grammys. 

Now it’s heavily favoured to take two Oscars on March 15, along with some of the 10 animation-centric Annie Awards for which it’s nominated. On March 12, Netflix confirmed a sequel is in the works. 

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 KPDH’s 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 K-Pop Demon Hunters fans have boosted the popularity of his group in a way he hasn’t seen since at least 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 up 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 also increased 34 per cent year-over-year since the film’s release, as fans flock to the museum’s gift shop to buy movie merchandise.

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

It’s worth noting that spring and fall are usually a more popular time for travellers to visit Korea than summer. During the same months of the year prior, they’d grown by just 17 per cent.

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 to the year prior, also 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 KPDH pop-up in Seongsu-dong in December, and considers it a highlight of their trip.

“The kids know all the characters and the moments in the movie,” Ms Ishak 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.” 

Creatrip chief executive officer Yim Haemin believes the K-Pop Demon Hunters fervour is unlike anything 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 with English speakers – travellers from the US, UK, Canada and Australia – has given this wave much broader global traction and deeper engagement with aspects of Korean culture that stretch well 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 directly book and experience in Korea. The film essentially functions as a 90-minute showcase of Korean daily life, except it’s wrapped in a story that 500 million people watched,” she says. 

Set-jetting, the trend in which people plan trips to places they’ve seen on screen, has been dominant elsewhere, to the point of causing overcrowding in some places. Hallstatt, Austria, has become an overtourism poster child ever since families realised it was the real-life inspiration for the kingdom of Arendelle in Frozen. And Disney’s Encanto has driven more moderate tourism traffic to Colombia’s coffee region, a place that was far off the radar for many international travellers beforehand.

In Seoul, K-Pop 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 recognizable locations, KPDH fans 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 super heroes.” Bloomberg