Korea’s hospitality sector is facing its most significant regulatory shake-up in years, as the government moves to fundamentally reshape how the nation’s hotels earn their stars. The sweeping changes blend bureaucratic streamlining for hotel operators with aggressive new penalties designed to protect consumers from price gouging. Starting Wednesday, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism will implement a comprehensive overhaul of its hospitality rating criteria, according to an official decree. The initiative replaces a convoluted, multitiered framework with a single, unified evaluation standard — a long-awaited response to an industry that hoteliers argued had grown out of step with a modern global tourism market. Under the new guidelines, the criteria used to judge everything from a modest budget property to a sprawling five-star luxury resort will be integrated into a standardized points system. The move is engineered to alleviate the substantial administrative and financial hurdles faced by operators, who previously had to navigate vastly different compliance rules depen