(Updated 4/30/24)
Most people visiting Korea for the first time spend their time in Seoul. But if you’re lucky enough to have more time, you may want to explore more of the country. Trains and buses are a great way to get around (though renting a car can be great too – see a separate post for some hints on how to do that.) I’ll highlight a couple of pointers here for reserving train tickets on-line. The trains are clean, run on-time, have free wifi, and for most destinations are much faster than driving. And, happily, reserving train tickets is one of the things that you can do on-line with a foreign credit card!
One warning is that around the major national/family holidays (Chuseok, Seollal, Lunar New Year) tickets get booked up early, and if you wait too long, you won’t be able to find a seat at all. You can book tickets up to a month before your planned travel dates.
First, go to www.letskorail.com.
(Note: if you get part way through the process of booking a ticket and something stops working, try switching the language to Korean. I have found that the English versions of Korean websites can sometimes be a bit less reliable, and sometimes something stops working. But if you’ve worked your way through the site in English, you’ll be able to figure everything out in Korean as well, and of course any translation app will help you navigate.)
Let’s say that you want to book a train ticket from Seoul to Wonju. You’ll come to a screen that looks like this, where you can enter your desired departure and destination locations and desired times/dates of travel. (You can only buy one-way tickets.)
If you now click on the “inquiry” button, you’ll be given some options, as shown here:
If one of these options works for you, then go ahead and select your desired tickets. However, if you entered “Seoul” as your departure location, it means “Seoul Station”, not the city of Seoul. If you click on the Departure button, you’ll get a menu of all the train stations in the country. The stations in the top part of this screen are the major train stations and if you use the alphabetic list at the bottom you’ll find stations in other locations.
The problem is that this window doesn’t tell you which of these stations are in Seoul.
The train stations in Seoul are: Seoul, Yongsan, Cheongnyangi, and Yeongdeungpo. If I choose Cheongnyangi as my departure station for my proposed trip to Wonju, you’ll see that I get a lot more options, as shown here.
I haven’t figured out a way to check all the stations in Seoul simultaneously, so you will either have to check each of the stations, or if you look at this rail map, you can figure out which of the stations in Seoul will have trains that will run to your destination.
If you want to know what the different train types are, you can look here.
Once you’ve selected the reservation you want, you can proceed through the payment process, which should accept a foreign credit card. If you need to make changes or get a refund, you can do so on-line, which is very convenient.
One thing to be aware of is that many cities in Korea have more than one train station. Often there’s an old station, and a new station (often labeled with a “sin” prefix), and sometimes trains from different starting points will arrive at different stations. In many cases, the newer station is now the main station, so it can be a little confusing. So just take care that you know which station you’re arriving at (or more importantly, that you know which station you’re departing from!)
Have fun exploring!
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!
