The purpose of this study was to document a phenomenon of rural tourism in Korea by Investigating characteristics of 50 villages that had participated in a competition of 'stimulation of rural village' The results are as follows: 1) The degrees of activation of rural tourism varied according to marketing efforts made by individual provincial(local) government. The results of contest indicated that provinces such as Gangwon-do, Chungnam-do, and Gyunggi-do showed highest performance among other competing local governments; 2) The results revealed that the total profit generated from direct sale of farm products outnumbered profits gained from sales of lodging and foods. This indicated that there is a room for improvement with respect to boosting more sales on lodging and food; 3) The regression analysis indicated a significant relationship between profits earned from sales of experiential tourism product and those from direct sale of farm products(multi-correlation coefficient: 0.38); 4) It was identified that Gyunggi and Ganwon provinces were ranked first in sales of foods and those of lodging, respectively; 5) Finally, it was showed that among the 50 participating villages, only 16 ones hold festivals by means of attracting tourists from outside.

This study aims to suggest new development strategy for rural villages considering their tourism income. In order to select the several study villages, the present study surveyed roughly the outline for resource characteristics about green-tourism of 83 rural tourist villages introduced on the internet. On the five rural villages, which are Moondang-ri, Yangsoo-ri, Molwoon-ri(Tomato-village), Yongsan-ri(Yongbayi-gol), and Kaya-ri(Ogam-village) located on Chungnam, Kyunggi, Kangwon, Chungbuk, and Kyunggi province, this study surveyed detailed data on the tourism income. The results show that the food sales business in the village makes about 50% of the total village income per year from the tourist, and followed by agricultural products sale, stay in farmhouses, and experience activity in the villages. The average total income of the five villages was estimated 93 million won per year and the average income per household was 1.5 million won in the study villages. The study suggests new strategy with the three kinds of important components for the rural village development considering the analysis results such as the bringing up of human resources for the village management and developing experience program for tourist, the characterization of agricultural products in the village, and the remodeling of village amenity environment for tourists.