Warning lights are flashing across South Korea's golf industry as falling course visits, rising costs and a shrinking customer base converge. Waiting for the slump to end and a boom to return, as the industry has done in the past, will no longer ensure survival, industry watchers warn. In an era when uncertainty has become a constant, what the Korean golf industry needs is resilience — the capacity to absorb shocks and drive structural change.
Kim You-kyum, a professor of sport management at Seoul National University, delivered a lecture on diagnosing and strengthening the resilience of Korea's golf industry at the 2026 Korea Golf Industry Forum on the 11th.
"The cause of chronic anxiety is failing to prepare properly because the industry denies a downturn even while knowing a boom cannot last," Kim said. "From now on, the winners will not be the companies that fend off downturns but those with superior resilience." He added that the industry must first abandon the illusion that it can return to the peak of 2020 through 2022, when it enjoyed an unprecedented boom driven by the pandemic.
Kim identified four components of resilience: forecasting, buffering, recovery and transformation. He singled out forecasting as the most critical. "Right now the domestic golf industry has virtually no scientific forecasting infrastructure," he said. "Only when accurate data-based forecasting comes first can the industry prepare buffers to absorb shocks and build the capabilities needed for recovery and transformation." As concrete steps, he proposed a golf industry early warning system that continuously reads leading and coincident indicators, along with an official demand outlook produced jointly by the government and industry associations that reflects demographic change.
Kim stressed that inbound golf tourism — foreign visitors traveling to Korea — is central to buffering, recovery and transformation. "Major countries abroad, including Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Malaysia, have already scrapped visa barriers and are aggressively growing their inbound golf markets through government-led marketing and support for charter flights and accommodation," he said. "Korea needs a strategy to attract foreigners who visit on themed trips as new customers."
Kim pointed to combined programs pairing education, academic conference and incentive travel with sports as a leading alternative. "If domestic universities and institutions partner with golf courses to build a golf theme into education and conference training programs, the industry could absorb enormous inbound demand," he said. Encouraging visitors to enjoy education, conferences and golf together while also using golf courses' convention facilities, lodging, resorts and nearby shopping would generate stable revenue to offset a shrinking golf market, he said. "Clarifying the theme creates a clearly defined target group and ties in industries beyond golf courses to create synergy," he said. "If inbound demand picks up and golf courses become structurally stronger, the result will be a virtuous cycle that also widens opportunities for Koreans to play golf more cheaply and in more varied ways."
