Name: The Bizarre History of Tourism to North Korea
Uploaded: 2026-01-19T17:11:22.000Z
Duration: 47 min 8 s
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For a very brief five day window between the 20th and 24th of February 2025, the world's most reclusive country, North Korea, opened itself up again to the first Western tourists to the country in more than five years.

For its entire existence, North Korea has generally tended towards heavy isolationism.

But then when the COVID 19 pandemic struck in early 2020, it sent North Korea's isolationism into overdrive.

The country was the very first one in the world to completely seal their borders off from the outside world at the onset of the pandemic on 21st January 2020.

And and then they never allowed any Westerners to visit the country again for more than half a decade until this recently unprecedented trip in February, where they allowed just 13 Westerners to enter the country again on a strictly controlled, limited and guided tour of the city of Rason in the very far northeast corner of North Korea that's just across from the tripoint border with Russia and China.

No Americans were a part of the tour group, and

instead the travelers were made up of visitors hailing from the uk, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Greece, who all crossed over into North Korea by land across the border from China.

Many of the Westerners who visited North Korea during this brief trip have since uploaded videos of their experiences here on YouTube that I strongly recommend you view later, many of which have since racked up millions of views.

But just as North Korea barely cracked open the door to Western tourists again after more than five years, allowing only a handful of people to visit just a single city right across the border from China, the they slammed the door shut again just a couple of weeks later and announced another indefinite end to Western tourism in early March, returning right back to the hyper strict isolationism of the past five years, with hardly anybody from the outside world.

As of this video's production, the North Korean government has made no further announcements or clarifications on when Westerners may be allowed to return back to the country, if ever.

And at the moment, the only foreign nationality that's actually allowed to enter into the Hermit Kingdom at all are Russians.

Owing to the increasingly close geopolitical relationship between the Russian and North Korean governments, In February of 2024, North Korea began allowing Russian citizens to visit the country as tourists, representing the first and so far basically only foreign tourists who have been welcomed to the country since early 2020.

But the numbers of Russians who have actually visited North Korea since then have been extremely low.

Fewer than 900 Russians decided to actually visit North Korea throughout 2024, even though every Russian theoretically could.

And those numbers don't appear to be increasing this year in 2025 either.

So basically, hardly anyone at all has visited North Korea since January of 2020.

And there's no clear timeline right now for when anyone other than Russians might be welcomed back again.

Which is all extremely bizarre when you also consider just how much effort the North Koreans have recently put into actually trying to attract tourists to the country.

It's believed that North Korea has recently invested big billions of dollars into revamping their tourism sector since they closed the country down in 2020.

In an apparent hope to attract huge numbers of tourists once they finally begin reopening themselves again.

The regime has recently put great efforts with their limited resources into building out a brand new large scale ski resort at Samjian, just across the border from China, complete with a brand new airport and train station located directly nearby, along with a separate and massive sprawling new beach resort on the country's east coast at Wonsan, built across a five kilometer long stretch of beach with about 150 separate hotels and numerous restaurants and attractions that has been estimated to now be the largest single owner beach resort on the entire planet.

Tourism has always been attractive to North Korea because it's one of the few ways that the country can actually legally acquire desperately needed foreign currencies like dollars, Euros and yuan.

Since tourism is one of the few sectors that the overwhelming sanctions imposed on North Korea by the UN have never touched before COVID tourism in North Korea was actually a consistently growing industry to the point where hundreds of thousands of people visited the country both 2018 and in 2019 before the door slammed completely shut in 2020.

North Korea earned hundreds of millions of desperately needed dollars in both of those years from tourist revenue.

And the regime has clearly invested billions of dollars into brand new resorts to try and return back to those numbers, and

So why then have has North Korea completely shut itself off from visitors from the outside world for the past half a decade if it used to be so lucrative for them?

And why did they open up just a single small border city to a small group of western tourists in 2025, only to immediately close it again just a couple of weeks later, with no information given on when or even if Westerners, or anyone, even besides Russians, will ever be able to enter again?

Why can you watching this video not visit North Korea even if you wanted to?

Despite North Korea's current reputation for being hyper reclusive, it wasn't always exactly like this.

And the history of the tourism industry in North Korea is probably the most bizarre and interesting of any country in the world.

During the Korean war in the 1950s, North Korea's capital and largest city, Pyongyang, was largely destroyed by the fighting and was rebuilt afterwards with assistance from the Soviet Union.

Throughout this period up until 1980, there were only three hotels that were ever built in Pyongyang.

The levels of visitors to North Korea was incredibly small.

But all of that finally started changing a bit in the 1980s, when the North Korean government decided to begin adopting tourism as a major economic strategy.

Most of this was because North Korea was selected to host the World Festival of Youth and students in 1989, a left wing festival held occasionally since 1947 in primarily communist and socialist states.

To prepare for the arrival of more than 20,000 expected participants in the festival and to show their country off on the world stage, the North Koreans knew that they needed to dramatically, dramatically upgrade their tourism infrastructure from practically non existent to something much more substantial.

3 new large capacity hotels were planned to begin construction in Pyongyang leading up to the 1989 festival.

But none of them were as grandiose and ambitious as the Ryugyong Hotel was planned to be, with construction beginning in 1987.

The original plan was to finish out the hotel within two years by the time of the festival.

Designed to soar 330 meters, or 1080ft high, the Ryugyong Hotel was intended to become the tallest hotel in the world at the time, eclipsing what was then the record holder in Singapore, the Westin Stamford.

At only 226 meters, or 741ft tall, at about the same height as the Eiffel Tower, the Ryugyong Hotel was going to be by far the tallest building in North Korea and the centerpiece of the Kim regime's capital that they wanted to showcase to the rest of the world.

In 1989, it was planned to have about 3,000 rooms for guests across more than 100 floors.

And the country was so proud of it that it even started appearing on North Korean postal stamps while the construction was still ongoing.

Overall, the North Korean government would spend an estimated $4.5 billion over four years preparing the country for the 1989 festival, equivalent to nearly a quarter of the country's entire annual government budget.

But when the World Festival of Youth and students arrived in 1989, the ambitious Ryugyong Hotel in particular was still nowhere near to being completed.

Nonetheless, 22,000 people from 177 countries from around the world attended the festival hosted in Pyongyang, including 100 citizens from the United States, marking the largest internationally attended festival to ever be hosted in North Korea.

With the centerpiece Ryugyong Hotel unfinished, however, the plan was updated after the festival to finish the building by the time of Kim Il Sung's 80th birthday in 1992.

The founder of North Korea and the country's reigning Kim dynasty.

However, North Korea ended up entering into the worst economic crisis in its entire history Shortly afterwards in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The Soviet Union was always North Korea's primary source of foreign aid and trade, and

so its sudden collapse threw North Korea into a deep recession that saw the economy collapse by 25% in the early 1990s.

By 1992, construction on the Ryugyong Hotel had advanced far enough to top the building out at its final intended architectural height of 330 meters.

But the economic crisis that was by then enveloping the country forced the remaining construction a halt, leaving behind a colossal, unfinished concrete skeleton without any windows, fixtures, or fittings that dominated the Pyongyang skyline.

At the time, there were newspapers in Japan that estimated the North Korean government had already spent about $750 million on the building's construction, or about 2% of North Korea's total GDP at the time.

Rather than becoming the centerpiece attraction in Pyongyang and the tallest hotel in the world, like North Korea originally intended, three of Yong Hotel instead being the tallest abandoned building in the world for decades and a towering monument to North Korea's economic and financial problems.

Instead, despite the imagined completed building initially appearing on North Korea's postage stamps, the government would later begin manipulating official photographs of Pyongyang by removing the unfinished concrete eyesore from the skyline entirely, while government printed maps of Pyongyang simply deleted the building from existence, despite the fact that it still utterly dominated Pyongyang's skyline for the next 16 years.

After 1992, the hollow concrete shell of the Ryugyong Hotel haunted the Pyongyang skyline until 2008, when an Egyptian construction company called Oriscom entered into a deal with the North Korean government to finally finish it out.

By then, the North Korean plan under the new leader, Kim Jong Il, was to finish the building by the time of then deceased Kim Il Sung's 100th birthday, 2012.

By mid-2011, the exterior of the hotel was finally covered with installed glass panels, and

by late 2012, photographs of the hotel's interior were finally released on the Internet for the very first time, which showed that it was still completely bare with no cabling, wiring, or piping.

While the exterior of the hotel was finally disguised with glass, the interior of it continued remaining completely empty and hollow.

In November of 2012, a German luxury hotel management company called Kempinski announced that they would be operating the Ryugyong Hotel.

But then, just the following year, in 2013, they pulled out after North Korea successfully detonated their third nuclear weapons test.

Skyrocketing tensions between North Korea and the west that made operating a major hotel in Pyongyang by a Western company extremely risky.

All construction on the hotel halted once again, and

then some modest activity at the site was detected again between 2016 and 2018.

In 2018, with the hotels still abandoned and unoccupied after more than 30 years since the construction began, the North Korean government decided in a way, to finally begin cutting their losses on it by transforming the whole building into a gigantic electronic propaganda billboard.

One of the entire sides of the building was covered in a massive LED light display that prominently displays propaganda animations in films and the waving North Korean flag that dominates the skyline at night, making it one of, if not the largest LED billboards on the planet.

All this time later, now, nearly 40 years later, after construction first began and still dominating Pyongyang's skyline, there has never been a single guest who's ever paid to spend one night in the Ryugyong Hotel, which has earned it the infamous nickname in the international press as North Korea's Hotel of Doom.

But it's far from North Korea's only failed tourism project that's been left to rot away today.

Beginning in 1998, the North Korean government began specifically allowing South Korean tourists to visit a small area just across across the border around Mount Kumgae, which began steadily being developed into a mountain and beach resort area jointly by both North Korean and South Korean developers.

Eventually, in 2002, the North Korean government carved out a dedicated and separate administrative area in this region out of the Gangwon Province that they called the Mount Khom Gang tourist region.

South Korean tourists were initially welcomed to this special zone in the north by boat at first, and

then later by bus after a new road was built to it through the heavily militarized border region.

The South Korean company that was tasked with developing the Mount Kumgang tourist region was a branch of the Hyundai Corporation called Hyundai Asan.

They built multiple hotels, ski resorts, and golf courses in the region.

And most notably, they also introduced the world's first ever floating hotel to Mount Kumgang as the resort's flagship property as well, which all on its own is an incredibly bizarre story.

What would eventually become known as the Hotel Haegum Gang in North Korea in the 2000s originally began life as the five star Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resort.

In the late 1980s, the world's first ever floating hotel built over Australia's Great barrier reef about 70 km off the Australian coast.

At a cost of about $45 million, or more than $100 million adjusted for inflation to today's money.

The world's first ever floating hotel began construction in 1986 in Singapore and was then hauled out to the Great Barrier Reef by a heavy lift ship and opened up for business in 1988.

However, it wouldn't end up lasting very long here.

While the hotel's creators envisioned it as a diving and snorkeling paradise within the Great Barrier Reef, it was immediately beset by a host of unforeseen problems.

The only way to get out to the hotel was by boat or helicopter.

While frequent bad weather in the region prevented either from being able to move for long stretches of time, stranding guests at the hotel until the weather had passed, it also just turned out that there wasn't really that much else to do at the hotel other than dive or snorkel, which got old faster than the creators had anticipated.

A cyclone hit the hotel just a week after it opened, permanently damaging the freshwater pool that was a part of the resort.

While a significant ammunition dump left over from the Second World War was also quickly discovered just a couple of miles away from the hotel, which began scaring people away.

So within just a year from opening, the hotel was already in dire financial straits, and

so it was sold to another company in Vietnam in 1989 that relocated it about 3,400 miles northward to Ho Chi Minh City, where it became that city's first five star hotel.

It was renamed to the Saigon Floating Hotel and State Board in the Saigon river for nearly another decade, until it once again began running into financial difficulties in 1998 and was forced to shut down.

The original plan at the time was to just dismantle the structure, but

this was also the exact same year that the North Koreans opened up the Mount Geumgae tourist region to large scale tourism from South Korea.

Hyundai Hassan, who was building out the resort area, discovered that the floating hotel in Vietnam had just shut down and decided that buying it and towing it from Vietnam to North Korea was going to be cheaper and easier than starting a brand new construction project in North Korea from scratch.

So Hyundai Hassan then bought the floating hotel for around $18 million, just 40% of its original construction price, towed it back to where it was built in Singapore for repairs and renovations, and

then towed it up to the Mount Kumgang tourist region in North Korea to begin its and most bizarre final phase of life.

For a long time, the Mount Kungging resort area was the most successful attempt at tourism that North Korea has so far ever managed to accomplish.

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The Bizarre History of Tourism to North Korea

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