Sino-NK

When Young Pioneer Tours (YPT) and Koryo Tours became the first Western tour agencies to return to North Korea in February it appeared the country was finally reopening to tourism after five years following the Covid-19 pandemic.

Both companies were offered access to Rason, the special economic zone bordering China and Russia in the far northeast of the DPRK, though with neither permitted to return with paying customers. Although Koryo Tours at the time stated the “country is not yet fully open”, and YPT announced similar, with the caveat that the door to North Korea “is certainly ajar”, their trips fueled expectations that the DPRK may finally be ready to welcome back international visitors for the first time since January, 2020.

Yet by March, Koryo Tours had announced Rason was “temporarily closed”. Despite being able to resume its tours for the Pyongyang Marathon in April, with guests on sport delegation visas rather than those for tourists, Koryo Tours currently has no planned trips to the DPRK, according to its website. YPT stated on its own site on 1 September that North Korea remains “officially closed to tourism”.

Koryo Tours General Manager Simon Cockerell said the reasons as to why North Korea appeared to reopen and then close again are unclear, with the country “on brand” in failing to make its thinking known. “Rason was potentially a local decision,” Cockerell told Sino-NK. “A special economic zone will have differing rules and regulations [to the remainder of the country].”

Russian tourists, by contrast, have seen far greater access to the country – even compared to the DPRK’s other key historical ally, China. These new tourism dynamics in North Korea appear to reflect changing geopolitical priorities, with Pyongyang focused on its renewed ties with Moscow.

Russian tourists first in line

A year before YPT and Koryo Tours were permitted limited re-entry, in February 2024 North Korea welcomed 100 Russian tourists on an Air Koryo flight from Vladivostok to Pyongyang. At the time, the return of Russian tourists to the DPRK ahead of other nationalities, particularly those from China, was considered a surprise, particularly out of context from what were at the time escalating high-level exchanges between Moscow and Pyongyang.

Although North Korea did not reportedly send troops to fight alongside Russia against Ukraine until the end of 2024, the Vladivostok trip earlier the same year represented one of a number of stages in warming Russia-DPRK bilateral relations, a process which began the year prior.

In September 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had made a high-profile visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East to meet with President Vladimir Putin, only Kim’s second visit to Russia since taking power in late 2011. Then in June 2024, three months after the Vladivostok Air Koryo flight, Putin visited Pyongyang to sign a Treaty on a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with North Korea. Article 4 states: “If one party is subjected to an armed attack by one or more states, putting it in a state of war”, the other shall “provide military and other assistance with all means at its disposal”. Within months, North Korea had sent troops to Russia to fight Ukraine, the first active engagement by the KPA in a conflict since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Since then, Russians have continued to see greater tourism access to North Korea than any other nationality. In July 2025, Russian tourists became the first foreign nationals to visit the new Kalma Resort adjacent to Wonsan on North Korea’s east coast, and within days of its opening to domestic tourists. The resort, documented on Russian social media by those first visitors, shows pristine yet mostly empty beaches. Vokstok Intur, one of the Russian tour companies which organised the first tours to Kalma, did not respond to questions from Sino-NK.

YPT Founder and Managing Director Gareth Johnson said there was no immediate prospect of tourists from countries other than the DPRK itself and Russia reaching Kalma. “The door remains closed to us,” he told Sino-NK.

Further development of Russian-DPRK tourism ties have continued. In April, Russia announced its first dedicated road bridge connecting to North Korea at Tumen-Khasan to be opened in 2026, and the first direct Moscow-Pyongyang flight of the new millennium landed at Sunan International Airport in July of this year.

Samjiyon, a city dedicated to Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary activity in northern Ryanggang province, represents perhaps the most significant indication of North Korea’s changing priorities. Prior to the pandemic, as the North Korean government continued to develop Samjiyon as a new tourism hub showcasing Kim Il-sung’s guerilla achievements, Chinese tourists made up the vast majority of its visitors, many of whom stayed in the sparse Paegaebong Hotel. Located close to the Chinese border and Mt Paektu, Samjiyon lies 200kms from the nearest Russian territory, at Tumen-Khasan.

Yet Russian tourists appear to be the first foreign nationality to return to Samjiyon since the global pandemic. Korea Konsult, a Swedish tour company which has operated tours to the DPRK for more than two decades, told Sino-NK it had taken Russian tourists to Samjiyon this Summer, adding the city remained closed to all other nationalities, including Chinese.

Photos from Korea Konsult show the extent to which North Korea has overhauled Samjiyon. The Paegaebong Hotel was demolished and rebuilt in a new mountain location, and the city now features wider boulevards and pristine new residential blocks.

Chinese visitors slow

Prior to the DPRK’s closing in early 2020, Chinese tourists were estimated to make up at least 90 percent of foreign visitors to the country owing to the long, 1,350-km border with China, and historically close yet turbulent ties. However, Chinese tourism to North Korea has showed few signs of returning to the levels of five years ago.

While Chinese apparently remain behind Russians in terms of entry to Samjiyon, there are indications other well-worn Chinese routes to the DPRK have also failed to reopen. In Ji’an, which faces the North Korean city of Manpo across the Yalu River, China built a new bridge and border crossing in April 2019, with Chinese news media reporting 200,000 people were expected to cross the border annually.

At the time, Sino-DPRK relations were in the midst of a renaissance. Having failed to meet his North Korean counterpart during the first five years of his rule, Chinese President Xi Jinping met Kim five times between March 2018 and June 2019, but only once since as Russia-North Korea ties have comparatively accelerated – in early September, on the sidelines of WWII anniversary events in Beijing.

As in Samjiyon, there is no sign Chinese tourists have returned to Manpo. Ji’an International Travel Service, a company majority-owned by the Ji’an Finance Bureau of the municipal government, had been running Ji’an-Manpo tours since 2014. Calls to the company by Sino-NK requesting updates on its tours to North Korea went unanswered, and there have been no reports detected in Chinese news media on a possible reopening to tourism.

In Dandong, China International Travel Service (CITS) previously operated half-day, full-day and overnight trips to Sinuiju prior to Covid-19, the latter with a stay in nearby Tongrim at a Chinese-built hotel. However, a representative of the company who previously signed up tourists on these trips and had communicated with Sino-NK prior to the pandemic did not respond to emailed questions on whether these tours had resumed.

The reasons for the slow response from China and its tourism companies to North Korea’s reopening remain unclear. While Chinese tourists appear to be behind the queue at the new Kalma resort and in Samjiyon, Johnson of YPT said he suspects the DPRK wishes to offer the same degree of access to Chinese visitors as those afforded to Russians “but perhaps the hold-up is from the Chinese side”, adding: “I suspect its politics.”

Back to business?

The exact timelines of when and how foreign business trips resumed to North Korea remain yet more difficult to determine. In early 2025, Dutch businessman and long-term DPRK visitor Paul Tjia announced his company GPI Consultancy was planning to lead one of the first Western international business delegations back to North Korea for a trip that was to be organized by the Pyongyang Chamber of Commerce for May of this year. However, Tjia said the trip never went ahead amid difficulties securing the necessary DPRK business visas. He told Sino-NK: “European business missions [to North Korea] are basically not feasible at the moment”, adding Chinese and Russian business delegations had resumed.

The Pyongyang International Trade Fair was scheduled from 27 to 30 October for North Korean, Russian and Chinese visitors only, according to Korea Konsult. However, Johnson of YPT told Sino-NK he had received recent guidance that foreign visitors to the trade fair had subsequently been blocked from attending entirely, despite other continued business exchanges involving Russia and China to the DPRK.

As with North Korea’s entire post-pandemic tourism policy, the precise rules remain difficult to determine, and the country’s motivations less so still. What is clear is that, following renewed political, military and economic cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang, Russian visitors have received priority access to the DPRK – ahead of those from China, and much in front of the rest of the world.