This study is an exploratory approach on educational tourists who try to the existence of the self through tourism, presuming that the essence of tourism lies in education. Previous studies revealed that foreign students is the closest type of educational tourists. In-depth interviews were conducted with Chinese international students with tourism experience while staying in Korea to derive the grounded theory for educational tourists. Using Strauss and Corbin's method, concepts were derived by open coding, a paradigm model was constructed by axial coding, finally situational model was suggested by selected coding. The 6 categories were found including emerging tourism motivation, overseas study stress, tourism constraints, forming tourism expectation, tourism negotiation and changed daily life after tour. With all strong desire for travel, foreign students are restricted from tourism or under tourism constraint. Their constraints were named as student constraint, foreign student constraint and stranger constraint, which were named as triple constraints. International students were not able to find their self-existence through educational tourism, even though they were in a better position by practicing school education as well as in their daily lives into tourism. However, they were also endeavor to overcome this situation through constraints negotiations. Findings are significant in that it expanded the realm of tourism constraints especially limited to short-term visiting tourists and provided clues to more productive research on educational tourists in future.