HanaTour CEO Song Miseon Shares Crisis Management Strategies
"Accelerating Global Expansion and AI-Based Innovation"
Song Miseon, CEO of Hanatour, identified a prepared mindset, a digital communication strategy, and immediate responses to new travel trends as the key factors that enabled the company to maintain its position as the industry leader despite the travel sector's greatest crisis caused by COVID-19.
Song Miseon, CEO of Hanatour, is giving a presentation on the theme "50 Billion Won Deficit, Leadership That Faced the COVID-19 Crisis Head-On" at the '2025 Hankyung CEO Jeju Summer Forum' held on the 18th at Lotte Hotel Jeju. Photo by Hankyung
On the third day of the '38th Korea Economic Association (Hankyung) CEO Jeju Summer Forum' held at Lotte Hotel Jeju on the 18th, CEO Song gave a lecture and shared these insights.
She first reflected on the shock that the COVID-19 crisis, which began in 2020, delivered to the travel industry, saying, "We managed to endure through self-rescue measures such as selling real estate and capital increases, but with repeated variants like Delta and Omicron, no one knew when the market would reopen. It felt like we were being given false hope."
However, CEO Song explained that she was convinced the market would eventually reopen, and used the crisis period as an opportunity to reorganize the company's vision and services. "We refocused our business, which had expanded into cosmetics, duty-free shops, and hotels, back to travel, and also created a new corporate identity (CI). While other companies brought back their employees in October 2022, when visa-free entry to Japan resumed, Hanatour recalled all its staff a year earlier, in October 2021, to prepare," she said.
CEO Song also emphasized that the newly adopted digital communication strategy played a significant role in overcoming the crisis. "We focused on channels like YouTube and Instagram, considering that not only the MZ generation but also active seniors in their 50s and above use these platforms," she said. "In particular, to prevent customers from deleting the Hanatour application, which was not frequently used, we created short-form content, live broadcasts, and a travel creation platform."
She stated that, to address the biggest customer complaint about traditional travel agencies?the limitations of package tours?Hanatour proposed the 'package-style free travel,' which turned out to be a major success. "Under the principle of 'excluding what you dislike and including what you want,' we suggested a package-style free travel product that allows customers to combine their desired travel courses themselves," she said. "This eliminated the main sources of dissatisfaction, such as fixed schedules, early morning departures, forced shopping, and optional tours, thereby satisfying the three key factors of convenience, flexibility, and reasonable pricing."
CEO Song noted that the purpose of travel is shifting from 'where to go' to 'what to do,' and Hanatour quickly planned products reflecting this change. "We developed products focused on experiences in countries people haven't visited and activities they haven't tried, such as glacier trekking in Patagonia, and also created exclusive products for the 2030 generation, like whiskey tours," she explained.
CEO Song announced that Hanatour will accelerate its global expansion and AI-based system innovation. "The next market to follow Korea's travel market growth curve is Southeast Asia, and Hanatour is already preparing for local expansion by establishing a subsidiary in Singapore," she said. "Since the traditional travel industry relies heavily on complex manual processes and experience, we plan to convert tasks that are difficult to handle with document-based manuals to large language model (LLM)-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems."
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