‘US travel ban will have no effect on us’

PYONGYANG: Washington’s ban on US citizens travelling to North Korea will have no effect on the country’s tourism industry and Pyongyang does not care about it ‘at all’, a senior development official insisted yesterday.

The measure is due to be enacted this week and once it goes into force US passports will no longer be valid for travel to the isolated country, which is subject to multiple sets of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes.

Around 5,000 Western tourists visit the North each year, tour companies say, with about 20 per cent of them Americans. Standard one-week trips cost about US$2,000.

But Han Chol-Su, vicedirector of the Wonsan Zone Development Corporation, denied the loss of business would have any impact.

“If the US government says Americans cannot come to this country, we don’t care a bit,” he told AFP in Pyongyang.