South Korean businesses are sprucing up to receive Chinese tourists during the Lunar New Year holidays, hoping the free-spending visitors bring a welcome boon to their otherwise slow business. Shops, hotels and restaurants in downtown Seoul put up new signs and banners inscribed with New Year greetings in Chinese, rearranged displays and hired Chinese speaking interpreters.

“Sales to Chinese tourists tripled in the past two years. This contributed greatly to the increase in our overall sales,” a spokesman for Lotte Duty Free shop in the busy Myeongdong commercial district said Saturday on YTN TV.