Visiting Korea is a blast, and Korean public transportation is famous for being cheap, convenient, and easy to use. But occasionally you might find that you need to take a taxi if you’re out late, or you’re trying to get to a location that isn’t easily accessed by bus or subway. Because most taxis are reserved through apps, it can be surprisingly difficult to hail a taxi from the street. But as you may have encountered, many Korean apps and websites don’t accept foreign credit cards, which in the past has made it very difficult for foreigners to use taxis. But the situation is now improving! Here are a few solutions via readily available apps.
- Kakao taxi
This is the most commonly used app for reserving a taxi, and it turns out that you can in fact pay for your ride even without a Korean credit card. When you enter your destination and pick-up details, you’ll see a choice of rides (“Venti”, “Blue”, “Black”, “General request”….) Once you choose the kind of ride you want, you can click on “payment options”, and then you can swipe to a screen that allows you to choose “pay driver directly”. Then once you’re at your destination, you can pay the driver with cash, a T-money card, or a foreign credit card. Here are a couple of screen shots to illustrate what you’ll see. (Note that some foreign credit cards charge foreign transaction fees, so you may want to pay via a T-money card to avoid these.)
UPDATE It looks like you can in fact register a foreign credit card now. On the payment options screen, you can “register a convenient payment method”. In the past, your only options here involved a Korean card, but now there’s an option for a non-Korean credit card! I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but this will certainly make life easier! (This is great, but you may still want to use the first option if your credit card charges you foreign transaction fees.)
Pros: works everywhere in Korea!
Cons: though you can enter addresses and destinations in Korean or in English, I often find that I have trouble entering Korean addresses in exactly the form that it wants, or that the app can’t find what I’m looking for, if I’m providing a more general location name rather than an address (e.g. Yonsei Severance Hospital).
- Citimapper
This is a great app that works very well for navigating around many major cities worldwide. Once you enter your destination, it will offer you various options for getting there (walking, biking, subway/bus…) One option is to book a taxi. If you click on this button, you’ll see different options for hailing a taxi or an Uber. If you’ve ever used Uber before, your foreign credit card information will already be stored and ready to go.
Pros: you can enter your destination in Korean or in English, and I’ve often found this app to be a bit more forgiving about the exact form of the address or the name of the location I’m trying to get to. I can often enter destinations more easily here than in KakaoTaxi.
Cons: In Korea, Citimapper only works in Seoul.
- Taba
The Korean government has just launched a new service called Taba, which is specifically designed to address some of the difficulties that foreigners face in trying to use taxis in Korea. Using Taba, you can pay with a foreign credit card, as well as enter your destination information in a variety of languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, and Thai at the moment.) It’s particularly geared towards short term visitors, by making it easy to select major tourist spots as your destination. It’s also tied to a larger set of services for tourists that are being developed (including translation screens that will provide information in a broader array of languages including English, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Malay, Indonesian, Arabic, Spanish, French, German and Russian). It’s just being rolled out, so I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it sounds promising! It’s available for download now, so give it a try! Here’s the link to the recent Korea Herald article introducing it.
Pros: Not sure yet, as I haven’t had a chance to use it.
Cons: You will have to register, but you can do this using a foreign phone number, and it’s quite painless.
About the writer
Hi, I’m Lee, and my husband and I are living in Seoul for the year while I’m on sabbatical. This is the second sabbatical year we’ve spent in Seoul, and we’ve gotten to know the city pretty well. I hope you find this information useful!
