Seoul City GuideAbout Seoul City Guide
An independent, unofficial guide to visiting Seoul — which palace closes on which day, what a ticket actually costs, and how to spend one, two or three days without queueing for things that have no queue. We are not the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the Seoul Tourism Organization, the Korea Heritage Service, the Korea Tourism Organization or any museum, tower or tour operator, and we sell nothing ourselves. The whole guide starts on the Seoul city guide homepage, and every figure on the site carries the date it was last read.
Why This Site Exists
Seoul punishes a vague plan in three specific ways.
The first is the closing days. The palaces do not share one: Gyeongbokgung and Jongmyo close on Tuesdays, Changdeokgung, Deoksugung and Changgyeonggung on Mondays, and the national museums close on neither. An itinerary built on the wrong day loses a morning.
The second is the one thing that genuinely sells out. Changdeokgung's Huwon garden runs on timed guided sessions with a hundred places each, half released online at 10:00 six days ahead — and in April, May, October and November that half goes in minutes.
The third is the assumption that booking ahead saves money. In Seoul it does at Lotte World and does not at the observatories, where the counter price is the same or lower.
So every price, hour and closed day here is read off the official page of the institution itself and stamped with the date it was read. Where an official source does not state a figure, the page says so rather than borrowing a plausible one.
Where the Information Comes From
Opening hours, closed days, ticket names and admission prices come from the institutions themselves: royal.khs.go.kr for the palaces and Jongmyo, museum.go.kr for the National Museum of Korea, seoultower.co.kr and seoulsky.lotteworld.com for the two observatories, lotteworld.com for the theme park, swcf.or.kr for Suwon's fortress, and leeumhoam.org for Leeum.
City-level information — transport fares, the Climate Card rules, the tourist information centre — comes from news.seoul.go.kr, seoulmetro.co.kr and english.visitseoul.net. Entry rules come from k-eta.go.kr. Where a Korean-language official page carries a figure the English one does not, we read the Korean page and say so.
Climate figures are the Korea Meteorological Administration's 1991–2020 normals for Seoul. Tour prices, ratings and review counts are the operators' own figures as published on their listings, and they are re-read when the page is re-checked.
Where a number could not be verified on an official page, this guide leaves it out. That is why some pages describe a price band rather than printing a figure.
How Often It Is Re-Checked
Every page carries a checked stamp and a next-review quarter. The whole site is re-verified quarterly against the official sources listed above, and individual pages are corrected whenever an operator publishes a change.
Seasonal programmes — the palace night viewings, the special garden openings, the festival dates — are re-read at the start of each season, because those are the figures that go stale fastest.
If you find something out of date, the contact page reaches us and corrections are made rather than argued about.
How the Site Earns
Some links to tours and tickets are affiliate links. If you book through one, the operator pays a commission at no additional cost to you, and that is what pays for the research time behind these pages.
Three rules follow from that, and they are not negotiable. Official ticket-office links are never affiliate links — where a palace or a museum sells its own ticket, we link straight to it. Where the gate price beats the partner price, the page says so; Seoul Sky and N Seoul Tower are both cases where booking ahead saves nothing, and both pages print that. And no operator pays for placement or for a favourable description.
The full statement is on the affiliate disclosure page.
What This Site Is Not
It is not official. It is not affiliated with the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the Seoul Tourism Organization, the Korea Heritage Service, the Korea Tourism Organization, or any of the palaces, museums, towers, markets or operators described here.
We do not operate or personally conduct these tours: every tour, ticket and experience described here is run by the operator named on its listing, and we are a guide to them rather than a seller of them.
It is not a booking platform. Every booking is made on the operator's or the institution's own site, under their terms, and payment never passes through this site.
And it is not a review site. Ratings shown on tour cards are the operators' own published figures rather than our verdicts; where we have a view about whether something is worth the money, the page says so in plain words rather than in stars.