About - Access Seoul

The throne hall of Gyeongbokgung across its wide flagstone courtyard, wooded hills behind it, with visitors walking the stone path and several of them in hanbok — Photograph by Tristan Surtel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

What this site is

Access Seoul is a guide to the practical half of visiting Seoul: how the transport card works, what is actually free, which palace is shut on which day, what has to be booked before you fly, and which of the famous names is worth its ticket.

The argument it makes

The old things cost almost nothing and the city never closes. Five royal palaces, and the admission to each is about what a coffee costs. The national museums are free. Eighteen kilometres of six-hundred-year-old city wall runs over the mountains with no gate and no opening hours at all. Eleven of the sixteen sight pages here charge no admission.

What Seoul charges properly for is the modern machinery around the old things — the observation deck, the cable car up to it, the special exhibition inside the free museum. And the one deadline that catches visitors is not a closing time but the last train, at around midnight.

Ritual musicians in red robes performing the Jongmyo Jeryeak on the shrine terrace — Photograph by Noh Mun Duek, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

How it is written

Pages are drafted with the help of AI and are checked and edited by a person before they are published. Facts that change — closing days, ticket structures, booking requirements — are checked against official sources, and every page carries the date it was last checked.

Where a number would date quickly, the page describes the mechanism and sends you to the operator for the figure. That is deliberate: a guide with a confidently wrong price in it is worse than one with no price at all.

The Seoul City Wall running along the ridge above the rooftops of the city — Photograph by Jjw, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Photographs

Every photograph here is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, credited to its photographer with its licence on the page it appears on. None are generated. Where a picture could not be verified as showing the place it claims to show, in the present day, it was not used — which on this build meant rejecting night shots, a monochrome frame, photographs of private individuals, and official press photographs of a named politician.

Money

Some pages carry affiliate links, marked as such, and we may earn a commission if you book through one. It costs you nothing extra and it does not influence what appears here or in what order. Pages that rank or compare things carry no affiliate links at all.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or has changed since we looked, we want to know. A moved closing day or a changed ticket is the most useful message you can send.

The packed central aisle of Gwangjang Market between rows of food stalls — Photograph by Stck w This photo was taken with Sharp Aquos R3, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Last checked 5 September 2026.