Getting Around Korea: The Complete Transport Guide

Korean public transport is among the best in the world and almost none of the difficulty is in the transport itself. It is in three or four conventions that nobody writes down for visitors. Get those right in your first hour and the rest of the country opens up.

The two things to do on arrival

1. Buy a transit card. One card covers the subway, city buses and most taxis, in every major city, and it gives you the transfer discount that cash does not. Convenience stores sell them.
2. Install Naver Map or Kakao Map. Google Maps has limited walking and transit routing inside Korea, for legal reasons rather than technical ones. This catches almost every first-time visitor.

Inside a city

Between cities

• High-speed rail reaches most of the country from Seoul in under three hours. It is the default for long distances.
• Express buses go where the trains do not, cost less, and are far more comfortable than the word “bus” suggests — reclining seats, three across.
• Domestic flights make sense only for Jeju. City centre to city centre, the train beats the plane everywhere on the mainland.
• Intercity buses leave from bus terminals, which are usually separate from train stations and sometimes on the other side of town.

The rules nobody tells you

1. 1

   Tap off on buses

   On the subway you tap through a gate and cannot forget. On a bus, the second tap is on you, and skipping it costs you a full fare and the transfer discount.

2. 2

   Transfers are free within about half an hour

   Bus to subway, subway to bus, bus to bus. You pay by total distance rather than by the number of vehicles, but only with a card.

3. 3

   Exit numbers are the address

   Koreans give directions as “exit 6, then left”. The numbering is reliable and consistent, and using it is faster than any map.

4. 4

   Ask for the destination in Korean script

   In a taxi, showing the name on your phone in Korean removes every pronunciation problem at once. Both Korean map apps let you share a place directly.

Airports

Incheon serves most international arrivals and is about an hour from central Seoul: a non-stop express train, a cheaper all-stop train, or an airport limousine bus that stops at hotel districts. Gimpo is closer to the city and handles domestic flights and some short-haul routes. They are separate airports and a connection between them is a journey in itself.

What it costs

By the standards of most countries visitors come from, Korean transport is inexpensive: a subway ride is small change, a cross-city taxi is the price of a sandwich elsewhere, and the fast train the length of the country costs less than a short domestic flight in Europe. Budgeting is rarely the constraint. Time is.