Hawai'i's visitor industry is getting ready for an expected surge in tourists from South Korea once visa restrictions are eased, which could come as early as year's end.

Hotels and other players in the visitor industry are now joining the effort launched by state tourism officials several years ago to market Hawai'i to South Korean visitors.

Last week, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Hawaii, working with New York-based Web developer Double Yolks, launched a new Korean language Web site: www.starwoodhawaiikorea.com.

The site features hotel information, a booking engine, guest room descriptions and images, a photo gallery and live webcams of the Starwood Hotels & Resorts in Waikiki (Sheraton Waikiki, The Royal Hawaiian, Moana Surfrider and Sheraton Princess Kaiulani).

The Web site will expand later this year to include additional pages featuring information about Starwood's neighbor island hotels on Maui, Kaua'i and Hawai'i.

"Starwood Hotels and Resorts Hawaii are already seeing great growth and potential in the Korean market," said Cheryl Williams, regional vice president of sales & marketing for Starwood Hawaii and French Polynesia.

"This new Web site is the first of many Korea-focused initiatives that we will be launching this year to actively promote our properties to a visitor market that is only going to continue to grow significantly in Hawai'i," Williams said.

David Uchiyama, Hawai'i Tourism Authority director of tourism marketing, said the state agency began looking closely at the Korean market in 2006, and the state started to invest more money to bring the level of awareness up.

One of the early initiatives undertaken by the HTA, the Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau and the Hawai'i Convention Center was to begin translating their Web sites into Korean.

More recently, tourism officials have begun working with the community colleges to structure a program to train hospitality industry workers to prepare for Korean visitors. Uchiyama said. The training includes language as well as cultural nuances.

"Those are some of the things that we need to get right from the beginning," Uchiyama said, "and not learn about them after we've offended people."

In addition, Uchiyama said, the agency is partnering with the University of Hawai'i's School of Travel Industry Management to get a clearer idea of who the visitors from Korea are now; what they liked, what they expected and demographic information about their ages, interests, travel party, Uchiyama said.

He said visitors preparing to return to Korea will be given a 30-question survey "so that we can get a better sense of who our customer is coming from Korea."

Uchiyama noted that the just-completed Hawai'i Tourism Korea mission was bigger this year, with Big Island Mayor Harry Kim, who is of Korean ancestry, and more than twice as many participants as other years.

Conventions also offer more potential growth, said HVCB's Michael Murray. "The power of the global economy has put Hawai'i in a great position to generate meeting and incentive business from Korea, and HVCB is seizing the opportunity," he said.

HVCB's translated Web site, www.BusinessAloha.com, went live in December 2007, and the sales materials were distributed into the market in early 2008.

The HVCB also hired Shigeru Nishi as regional sales director for Asia, with the objective to develop more meetings business from Japan and Korea. He was part of the sales team promoting Hawai'i in this week's Korean Mission, led by Hawaii Tourism Korea.

In addition, the HVCB is working with Hawaii Tourism Korea to bring meeting planners from Korea to Hawai'i for a familiarization trip later this year.