Busan’s Medical Tourism Record Was Built in Its Skin Clinics

BUSAN — Busan’s foreign medical tourism count more than doubled last year, giving the city the kind of headline local governments usually want. In 2025, 75,879 foreign medical tourists visited Busan, the highest figure since the city began promoting the sector in 2009. The total was up 151.5 percent from 30,165 a year earlier and lifted Busan to second place nationwide for the first time, behind Seoul. On paper, it was a breakthrough: Busan had moved from a regional player to the country’s leading non-capital destination for foreign patients. 

But the number becomes more complicated once it is broken down by what those visitors actually came to receive. Busan’s increase was not spread across university hospitals, check-up centers, dental clinics, rehabilitation programs or specialized treatment departments. The city added 45,714 foreign medical tourists in one year. Dermatology alone added 39,640, rising from 13,158 patients in 2024 to 52,798 in 2025. By that calculation, almost 87 percent of Busan’s net increase came from one specialty. 

That is the real story inside the record. Busan’s 2025 performance was counted as medical tourism, and legally it belongs in that category. But in substance, the growth was carried less by hospital-based medical travel than by beauty-linked outpatient care: skin treatment, laser procedures, injections, scar care and other short services that can be added to a trip without turning the trip itself into a medical journey. Dermatology accounted for 67 percent of Busan’s foreign medical tourists last year, while plastic surgery added another 6.5 percent. Together, the two fields made up nearly three quarters of the city’s foreign medical tourism count. 

That does not make the achievement false. It makes it more specific. Busan has shown that foreign visitors will pay for medical services in the city, but the published figures do not yet show that they are choosing Busan for the kind of broad medical capacity implied by the phrase “medical tourism hub.” They show, more clearly, that Busan has found a fast-growing place in Korea’s beauty-medical economy.

The national figures point in the same direction. South Korea attracted 2.01 million foreign patients in 2025, crossing the two-million mark for the first time since the government began compiling the data in 2009. Dermatology drew 1.31 million patients, or 62.9 percent of the total, and clinic-level facilities handled 87.7 percent of all visits. Seoul absorbed 87.2 percent of the traffic, helped by 2,555 registered foreign-patient attraction institutions, or 62.5 percent of the national total. The ministry attributed the concentration to the capital’s dense transport, tourism and medical infrastructure, as well as rising demand for dermatology. 

This is the constraint Busan has to face more honestly. Its problem is not simply that Seoul is bigger. Seoul already owns the machinery of Korean beauty medicine: registered providers, interpreters, agencies, online platforms, medical marketing, airport access, and the global image of Korean cosmetic care. Busan can win part of that traffic, especially from nearby Asian markets, but if it copies only the skin-clinic layer of Seoul’s system, it may gain volume without gaining much control over the industry.

The difference matters because Busan does have assets that should, in theory, support a more serious medical tourism strategy. Seo-gu was designated in 2022 as the first medical tourism special zone in Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang, built around a district with three university hospitals and one general hospital. The plan spoke of attracting foreign patients for severe treatment, expanding international care centers and foreign-patient beds, and building a medical research cluster. It was not designed merely as a storefront for quick cosmetic procedures. 

Yet the public numbers that explain Busan’s recent rise point elsewhere. The latest district-level figures available from 2024 showed Busanjin District attracting about 18,000 foreign medical tourists, or 60.4 percent of Busan’s total that year. The explanation was not a university-hospital cluster but Seomyeon Medical Street, where clinics, shopping, hotels and transport are packed into the same urban circuit. In Busanjin’s 2024 figures, dermatology accounted for 65.2 percent and plastic surgery for 14.8 percent. That means roughly four out of five foreign medical tourists in the district were counted in skin or cosmetic surgery fields. 

The contradiction is difficult to ignore. Busan talks about high-end medical tourism, tertiary hospitals, wellness stays and specialized care, but the traffic now lifting its ranking appears to be concentrated in the most easily consumed part of the medical market. It is not the Seo-gu hospital-led vision that is visibly carrying the numbers. It is the Seomyeon-style combination of clinics, hotels, shopping and short-haul Asian tourism.

Taiwan shows how quickly that combination can work. Taiwanese medical tourists to Busan rose from 7,219 in 2024 to 28,373 in 2025, making Taiwan the city’s largest source market. Taiwan was also Busan’s largest overall inbound tourism market last year, with 687,832 visitors. The medical tourism figure rose much faster than the general tourism figure, suggesting that Busan did more than receive more Taiwanese visitors. It converted more of them into clinic customers. 

That is commercially useful, but it is not the same as becoming a medical destination in the fuller sense. A traveler who adds a dermatology appointment to a Busan itinerary is making a different decision from a patient who travels for cancer treatment, cardiovascular care, joint surgery, a full medical check-up, dental reconstruction or rehabilitation. The first decision can be made around price, online reviews, convenience, a hotel location and a few available hours. The second requires confidence in doctors, records, translation, follow-up care, hospital systems and what happens if treatment becomes complicated.

Busan’s current numbers lean heavily toward the first decision. That creates a vulnerable kind of growth. Beauty procedures are easier to market, but also easier to copy. They are sensitive to exchange rates, airline routes, social-media trends, influencer promotion, discounting and a few visible safety controversies. A city that relies too heavily on those procedures can keep adding patients while still failing to build a deeper medical reputation.

The spending argument also needs more discipline. Nationally, foreign patients and their companions were estimated to have spent 12.5 trillion won on medical tourism in 2025, including 3.3 trillion won in medical spending, with an estimated 22.8 trillion won in production effects. Those numbers explain why local governments want foreign patients. But they do not answer the local question Busan has to ask: how much of its dermatology-heavy traffic stayed long enough, spent widely enough and returned often enough to change the city’s economy? 

A patient who comes for surgery or a full check-up may stay several nights, bring a companion, use interpreters and return for follow-up. A visitor who receives a skin procedure during a three-day trip may leave the clinic the same afternoon and continue shopping or dining. Both are counted. They do not produce the same local value. Busan’s public data do not yet separate those categories clearly enough: primary medical trips versus add-on procedures, medical spending versus tourism spending, hospital care versus clinic care, repeat patients versus one-time visits.

The same lack of detail matters for patient protection. Korean law requires foreign-patient attraction medical institutions to make information available to foreign patients, including diagnosis, treatment method, possible side effects, expected medical fees and dispute-resolution procedures in the event of a medical accident. The law also restricts excessive commissions and false information by medical institutions and patient-attraction agencies. 

Those rules are not technicalities in a beauty-procedure market. They are the difference between tourism promotion and medical responsibility. A laser procedure or injection may be quick, but it still requires consent, risk explanation, price clarity and aftercare. If swelling, infection, dissatisfaction or confusion appears after a patient has returned to Taipei, Tokyo or Shanghai, the city’s glossy medical tourism language matters less than whether the clinic, coordinator or public support channel can still be reached in the patient’s language.

This is where Busan’s 2026 plan should be judged. The city has selected 14 foreign-patient attraction partner institutions, including four general hospitals, two hospitals, six clinics and two Korean medicine providers. It says those institutions will receive support for overseas presentations, familiarization tours, wellness-medical tourism products, multilingual promotional content and platform-based promotion. 

The selection itself shows that Busan understands the need to broaden the field. The list includes general hospitals, a dental hospital, an eye hospital, skin clinics, plastic surgery clinics, a vascular clinic, an ophthalmology clinic and Korean medicine providers. But the support described by the city still leans heavily toward marketing: overseas briefings, fam tours, promotional content and travel-platform campaigns. Those can bring more visitors. They do not, by themselves, show whether Busan can move foreign patients from beauty procedures into check-ups, dental care, ophthalmology, rehabilitation, Korean medicine, wellness stays or hospital-based treatment.

The more useful test would be harder and less promotional. Busan should be able to say how many foreign patients are treated at tertiary hospitals, general hospitals, clinics and dental institutions; how many come for disease treatment rather than cosmetic procedures; how long they stay; how much they spend outside the clinic; how many are referred through agencies; how many complaints or follow-up cases are handled after departure; and how many return for another form of care. Without those numbers, the city can count arrivals, but it cannot show the depth of what it has built.

This does not mean Busan should reject the beauty-clinic traffic that produced its record. Dermatology is the part of medical tourism that currently fits Busan’s visitor economy best. It matches short flights, Asian source markets, shopping districts, hotels and the global appeal of K-beauty. It gives the city a real commercial opening.

But an opening is not the same as a hub. If Busan remains a lower-friction alternative to Seoul for quick skin procedures, its numbers may continue to rise while the city stays dependent on a narrow service category. If the city wants the word “medical” in medical tourism to mean more than beauty consumption, it has to show a path from first-time clinic visits to broader care: check-ups, dental treatment, eye care, rehabilitation, Korean medicine, wellness recovery and hospital departments that can stand on their own clinical reputation.

The 2025 record, then, should not be dismissed. It should be read more carefully. Busan has not merely attracted more foreign patients. It has exposed the exact shape of its medical tourism business: close to tourism, close to K-beauty, close to clinics, and still some distance from the hospital-led medical destination it says it wants to become.