Foreign visitors to Korea are increasingly treating pharmacies as shopping destinations, and the spending behind that shift is now large enough to register in the national tourism data, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported. In central Seoul, districts long known for cosmetics and fashion are filling with pharmacies aimed partly at tourists. Myeong-dong now invites comparison with Jongno, the district historically nicknamed Pharmaceutical Street. Around 40 pharmacies were operating across Myeong-dong and Eulji-ro in the first half of 2026, the paper reported, ranging from small community chemists to large pharmaceutical retail centres, and the same pattern is spreading to Seongsu and Gangnam.
Foreign spending on pharmacies climbs
The clearest measure comes from the Korea Tourism Organization. Its Korea Tourism Data Lab analysed foreign card payments for the period from January to September 2025, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported. Over those nine months international visitors spent 1.4285 trillion won at hospitals and pharmacies, up about 68 per cent on the 848 billion won recorded a year earlier. Pharmacies alone accounted for 6.2 per cent of foreign tourists’ total medical-category spending. The figures describe a real change in behaviour, not a marketing claim, because they are drawn from what visitors actually paid rather than from what retailers hoped they would.
A new pattern of Korean shopping tourism has emerged, the paper reported. Visitors now buy colour cosmetics from lifestyle retailers such as Olive Young and functional health products directly from pharmacies, widening their baskets from K-beauty into health functional foods, hygiene goods and other health-related items. Pharmacies in Korea are being used less as prescription counters and more as health-and-beauty shopping stops.
Where pharmacy shopping sits on the health-travel spectrum
The category needs care here. Pharmacy shopping sits at the low-intervention end of the health-travel spectrum, close to wellness tourism, where the visitor is improving or maintaining an already sound state rather than seeking treatment. There is little clinical involvement in buying a vitamin or a skincare product, and the setting is retail rather than a hospital. That places most of this activity firmly on the wellness side of the line, and wellness is a borrowed authority for a medical-tourism title, so the claim to make is a careful one. This is health-adjacent retail spending by inbound visitors, and it is growing fast, but it is not the same as the clinical medical tourism that Korea also runs.
The distinction matters commercially. Wellness and health-shopping visitors are easier to attract and cheaper to serve than surgical patients, and they spend across a wider basket, but they are also more discretionary and more exposed to fashion. A trend that turns pharmacies into destinations can reverse as quickly as it arrived if the novelty fades, whereas a clinical reputation, once earned, is stickier. Korea is fortunate to hold both, an established medical-tourism offer and a fast-rising health-shopping one, and the sensible strategy treats the second as a complement to the first rather than a replacement for it.
Larger formats and a museum-style pharmacy
The retail response has been to build bigger and more experiential. Warehouse-format pharmacies arrived first in Seongnam, in Gyeonggi Province, in June 2025. Running to between 150 and 300 pyeong, they now stock thousands of products on a self-service, mart-style model, with pharmacists on hand for consultation, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported. Their spread has drawn objections from smaller pharmacies worried about market concentration and about the public-service role of the neighbourhood chemist, and it has raised questions about the risk of drug misuse, even where the large operators comply with the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act.
At the more curated end, a museum-concept wellness pharmacy has opened a run of Seoul branches since September 2025, from Gangnam and Bundang to Itaewon and Jonggak. It organises medicines, health foods and lifestyle goods by category and, in some branches, uses software to suggest health functional foods to shoppers. Several branches carry self-measurement stations for stress, blood pressure, grip strength, body composition and skin condition, and staff at the tourist-heavy locations serve customers in English and Japanese, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported. The design choices, the categorisation by symptom and the in-store diagnostics are aimed at turning a pharmacy visit into an experience a tourist will seek out and repeat.
Cutting the friction for foreign buyers
The practical barriers to pharmacy shopping are language, product information and tax. A Korean tourism fintech has launched a QR-based purchasing helper for pharmacies that addresses all three, letting foreign customers scan a code to reach a webpage without downloading an app, read efficacy, dosage and precautions in their own language, and complete purchases and tax-refund requests, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported. Tools of this kind matter more than they look. Friction at the till, over language or a refund, is exactly what turns a browsing tourist into a non-buyer, and removing it is a cheaper way to lift health-shopping revenue than opening another store.
The wellness-retail pivot
The larger retailers are moving in the same direction. Olive Young, the dominant health-and-beauty chain, has opened dedicated wellness stores that sort products around eating, movement, rest, inner beauty and dermacosmetics, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported, with its first such format running to more than 500 brands and 3,000 products across two floors in the Gwanghwamun business district. The bet is that wellness follows the same export path K-beauty took, from a domestic retail category into a reason foreigners visit and spend. That is a plausible bet, and the tourism data give it early support, but it rests on a wellness market that is still young and on visitor tastes that can move.
What to watch
The number to track is the one the Korea Tourism Organization already publishes. If foreign spending at pharmacies keeps rising as a share of medical-category consumption, pharmacy tourism is a durable segment rather than a season. The second test is whether the experience formats and the friction-cutting tools travel beyond Myeong-dong, Seongsu and Gangnam into the rest of the country, because a trend confined to three Seoul districts is a neighbourhood story, not a national one. Korea has turned shopping into a reason to visit before. Whether it can do the same with health and wellness is the open question, and the card data, not the store openings, will answer it.
