Travel Service Platform Creatrip Fuels K-Wellness Travel Surge

• Travel service platform Creatrip aims to change South Korea’s tourism model by incorporating high-value medical and wellness travel.
• According to Creatrip data for 2025, beauty and medical services account for 51% of transactions, indicating a surge in demand for K-healthcare.
• In early 2025, medical tourism receipts exceeded ₩2 trillion, establishing K-wellness as a key development driver for the country’s tourism business.

South Korea is actively transforming its tourist strategy from conventional sightseeing to high-value medical and wellness stays. The digital platform Creatrip is at the forefront of this charge, having expanded from a simple travel service into a key connector for an international customer base that is keen on exploring innovative K-healthcare services. Notably, Creatrip recorded 1.6 million monthly active foreign users as of late 2025.

K-Healthcare to Boost Tourism in South Korea

South Korea is on track to set a tourism record with 22M anticipated foreign visitors this year, which is significantly higher than 2025’s 18.9M. As per inbound travel patterns and Creatrip CEO Lim Hye-min's statement, a significant portion of visitors arrive as a result of South Korea’s premium medical ecosystem. This ecosystem consists of conventional Korean medicine, thorough health screenings, IV wellness therapies, and dermatological treatments. 

Platform data revealed that specific segments are growing rapidly. Notably, in 2025, beauty and medical transactions constituted 51% of Creatrip's overall transaction volume, with dermatology alone making up to 36% of these bookings. Vision correction too acquired a significant portion of such travels along with IV therapy and health checkups, which surged well over 280% in the latter half of 2025 (H2 2025).

Back in 2024, Seoul's city government reported that 1.17M overseas medical tourists spent approximately ₩1.2 trillion (~ $833.80M USD) on healthcare services. Whereas, Travel Trade Today noted that in early 2025, medical tourism receipts surpassed ₩2T (~ $1.39 billion), indicating a major contribution to inbound revenue.

K-Wellness Powers High-Margin Growth

As these numbers show, Creatrip's shift is about profit margin rather than volume. Medical and wellness tourists are rapidly gaining traction in the travel sector. According to new research, these tourists spend substantially more per trip than those who reserve tables or taxis, and interestingly, they continue to return. Now that travel levels have stabilized, this category is visibly spending greater amounts than before. This shows that K-healthcare is now a primary conversion engine within South Korea's tourism stack, rather than as an add-on.