Beach resorts, ski slopes, soldier discounts and a Kremlin-backed defence pact have turned North Korea into Russia’s latest holiday frontier. Two years into the push, however, visitor numbers suggest the sales pitch has failed to take off.
Global (Tourism Reporter) — Barely two years after North Korea reopened its borders to Russian visitors, Moscow and Pyongyang have invested considerable political capital in presenting the country as Russia’s newest tourism frontier. The proposition has been packaged with surprising breadth: beach resorts on the east coast, ski holidays in the northern mountains, discounted “patriotic” tours timed around military anniversaries, and even dedicated concessions for Russian soldiers returning from service in Ukraine.
On paper, the ingredients for a tourism boom appear to be there — high-level diplomatic backing, expanding air and rail links between the two countries, and a steady stream of favourable testimonials from the relatively small number of Russians who have made the journey.
In practice, however, the numbers tell a very different story.
The political relationship may be deepening, but consumer demand has yet to follow. The widening gap between the rhetoric surrounding this emerging tourism corridor and its actual performance is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Built on Diplomacy, Not Demand. Producing a Trickle, Not a Wave
According to Sergei Krivonosov, deputy head of Russia’s State Duma Tourism Committee, around 5,000 Russians visited North Korea in 2025, with the figure expected to rise to roughly 6,000 in 2026. That represents annual growth of about 20 per cent — respectable on paper, but far less impressive when measured against the size of Russia’s outbound travel market.
Russians make tens of millions of trips abroad each year, even amid pressure on household travel budgets. Against that scale, 5,000 to 6,000 annual visitors is not a mainstream tourism market. It is a niche.
Artur Muradyan, vice-president of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia, has been equally candid, describing North Korea as a niche product within the wider Russian travel market. That assessment carries particular weight because it comes from within the industry selling the destination, rather than from an external critic. After two full seasons of operation and substantial political promotion, North Korea has yet to move beyond a specialist market.
The gap becomes more striking when measured against the political investment behind the tourism relationship.
President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Pyongyang in June 2024 — his first in almost 25 years — produced a mutual defence treaty that also called for expanded tourism cooperation between the two countries. Since then, senior Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have publicly promoted North Korean destinations. Lavrov visited the newly opened Wonsan-Kalma beach resort in mid-2025 and expressed confidence that Russian tourists would increasingly visit.
More than a year later, the numbers have yet to match the political confidence.
That is the central tourism lesson in the Russia-North Korea experiment: government endorsement can open a tourism corridor, but it cannot manufacture mass-market demand.
What’s Actually on Offer
The product itself is considerably more developed than the modest visitor numbers might suggest. That mismatch — a relatively sophisticated tourism proposition attracting only a tiny number of visitors — is arguably the most revealing feature of the Russia-North Korea experiment.
One Russian operator lists more than 40 North Korea itineraries, with entry-level packages starting at around $124 and premium multi-destination tours rising considerably higher, according to The Moscow Times. One popular eight-day itinerary departing from Vladivostok combines sightseeing in Pyongyang with a week at Wonsan-Kalma for close to $1,900. A shorter introductory package costs roughly $1,244, with a specific discount for veterans of the Ukraine conflict — a detail that offers an important clue about the market the tours are targeting.
The payment arrangements are revealing too. Tour operators require part of the trip to be paid in US dollars, while spending within resort areas is handled through hotel-issued wristbands pre-loaded with North Korean won. Even a tourism corridor framed within an increasingly anti-Western geopolitical partnership therefore remains connected to the dollar-based financial system at the point of commercial transaction.
The logistics are equally distinctive. Most routes funnel visitors through Russia’s Far East, particularly Vladivostok, rather than Moscow. Flights operate aboard Air Koryo, North Korea’s state carrier, whose fleet includes Soviet- and Russian-built aircraft, some dating back decades.
On arrival, Russian-speaking guides meet visitors, with itineraries typically combining Pyongyang sightseeing with onward travel to Kalma and the Wonsan-Kalma resort. Visitors are accompanied by assigned guides throughout their excursions, usually North Korean nationals who studied Russian.
This is tourism, but it is not conventional independent travel.
It is tightly managed, closely escorted and deliberately curated — a form of tourism that sits somewhere between a packaged holiday and a state-managed visitor experience.
And that may be precisely why it appeals to the small segment of Russian travellers who have chosen to make the journey. For them, the attraction is not simply the beach, the mountains or the price.
It is the experience of entering one of the world’s most isolated countries through a tourism corridor that Moscow itself is helping to build.
Selling Patriotism, Not Just a Holiday
Nowhere is that positioning clearer than in the marketing language itself. One of the more unusual packages is explicitly billed as a “Patriotic” tour, scheduled around North Korea’s Army Day celebrations in early 2027 and promoted as an opportunity to experience the country’s culture and traditions. The itinerary includes the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, the Myohyang Mountains, the International Friendship Exhibition, the Pyongyang Metro and, notably, an Orthodox church — a detail that folds the two countries’ shared Soviet-era history into the tourism proposition.
Video testimony from Russian visitors reinforces the ideological dimension. Footage shared by a Moscow couple who document their travels shows them watching a North Korean military choir perform the Russian national anthem, with senior Russian officials, including State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, among the audience, according to The Moscow Times.
In another clip, Russian tourists from Moscow open champagne on a hotel balcony and toast to North Korea while celebrating what they describe as defiance of their common enemies.
These are not conventional holiday motivations centred primarily on sunshine, relaxation or escape. They suggest a self-selecting segment of travellers attracted to the political symbolism of the destination as much as — or perhaps more than — its recreational offering.
That narrower appeal may help explain the persistently low visitor numbers.
The addressable market for ideologically driven tourism is, by definition, considerably smaller than the market for a conventional beach holiday.
The Push Factors Are Real — Just Not Enough
It would be a mistake to dismiss Russia’s North Korea tourism drive as vanity diplomacy detached from genuine market forces. There are real structural pressures pushing Russian travellers to look eastward for their holidays.
The European Union has tightened Schengen visa rules in recent years, while the November 2025 decision to restrict multiple-entry visas for most Russian applicants has made traditional Western and Southern European holiday markets considerably harder to access. For many Russian travellers, the added bureaucracy, uncertainty and cost have transformed what was once a relatively straightforward holiday into a more complicated proposition.
That squeeze has coincided with pressure on Russian household purchasing power, making overseas travel less attainable for a growing share of consumers. Against that backdrop, the logic of redirecting some outbound demand towards politically friendly and more accessible destinations is clear. North Korea’s leadership has recognised the opportunity.
But North Korea remains an imperfect beneficiary.
Alternative Asian destinations — Thailand, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates and China among them — offer far more developed tourism infrastructure, wider accommodation and activity choices, stronger service ecosystems and considerably less logistical friction. They also compete for the same Russian traveller without requiring the political curiosity or ideological interest that a North Korea trip can demand.
That leaves North Korea with a fundamentally narrower proposition.
It can attract travellers motivated by novelty, political affinity or curiosity about one of the world’s most closed societies. What it has struggled to attract, however, is the much larger pool of travellers simply seeking value, comfort, choice and reliable holiday infrastructure.
The Russian market may be looking east. But North Korea is competing for only a very small part of where that demand is actually willing to go.
The Uncomfortable Backdrop
The tourism proposition also comes with two realities that rarely appear in the glossy marketing.
The first is human rights. North Korea remains one of the world’s most repressive states, according to extensive reporting by international human rights organisations. Some of the major tourism developments now promoted as symbols of modernisation have also attracted scrutiny over how they were built. Samjiyon, for example, was transformed from a relatively modest provincial settlement into a major mountain tourism destination, with youth labour brigades reported to have been involved in its construction.
Human rights researchers who interviewed former brigade members have described working conditions on some such projects as exploitative, including reports of unpaid labour, inadequate food and extremely long working hours. None of that context appears in the tourism marketing, where destinations such as Samjiyon and Wonsan-Kalma are presented primarily as evidence of national development and hospitality.
The second concern is security.
Wonsan-Kalma sits along North Korea’s east coast, an area associated with the country’s ballistic missile testing activity. Tour operators maintain that the resort itself is safe and operationally separated from testing zones, arguing that missile launches do not take place within areas where tourists are staying.
Footage from Russian visitors illustrates just how unusual that proposition can look in practice. One tourist reportedly points towards offshore islands from a hotel balcony while casually noting the presence of a nearby missile-testing area, before the footage returns to conventional holiday scenes of visitors exploring the shoreline. Clearly marked zones also indicate where foreign tourists are permitted to walk independently.
Whether those assurances would withstand independent scrutiny is a separate question from whether they are commercially persuasive.
For the small cohort currently choosing North Korea, they appear to be sufficient.
But reassurance that works for a self-selecting niche is very different from the confidence required to build a mass-market tourism destination.
A Signal Worth Watching, Not a Boom Worth Believing
For the wider travel industry, the more instructive lesson may not be about North Korea itself, but about the limits of state-driven tourism marketing when it runs ahead of genuine consumer demand.
Diplomatic alignment, discounted pricing, veteran concessions and prominent political endorsement — including personal appearances by senior Russian officials — have generated headlines, expanded the range of tour products and attracted a modest, ideologically self-selecting visitor base.
What they have not generated is anything resembling mass-market tourism.
That distinction matters when assessing what comes next. It would be easy to interpret the growing number of tour listings, new transport links and high-profile diplomatic engagements as evidence that North Korea is approaching a tourism breakthrough. The visitor numbers point to a more cautious conclusion.
For now, North Korea has built a tourism proposition around political symbolism, novelty and tightly managed experiences. Those ingredients can sustain a niche market, but they are unlikely to produce the scale associated with a genuinely competitive international destination.
Unless Pyongyang and Moscow can broaden the proposition beyond patriotic branding and heavily escorted itineraries — while addressing the reputational and security concerns that constrain mainstream demand — the gap between the political rhetoric surrounding the tourism relationship and its actual visitor numbers is likely to persist.
And that is the lesson the global tourism industry should watch.
Tourism can be promoted by governments. It can be enabled by diplomacy. But ultimately, the traveller decides whether a destination becomes a market — or remains a curiosity.
Tourism Reporter analysis based on Russian tourism industry statements, tour operator information and reporting on the Russia–North Korea tourism relationship. Visitor figures refer to reported estimates for 2025 and projections for 2026.
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