✈️ Two Golden Weeks, One Flight Path — Woody Magazine, May 1, 2026
Two Golden Weeks, One Flight Path
It's May 1 — Workers' Day in South Korea, the start of a long weekend that runs through Children's Day on May 5. Burn one day of leave on Monday and you have a clean five-day stretch. Plenty of Koreans built their spring around it, and many of them are at Incheon Airport this morning. The ones who flinched, almost without exception, flinched in front of a payment screen.
This spring, round-trip airfares between South Korea and Japan have run 40 to 60 percent above their usual price. That isn't a peak-season markup. It's something rarer: the longest holidays in two neighboring countries starting on the same day.
Japan's Golden Week — a cluster of national holidays anchored by Showa Day on April 29 and Children's Day on May 5 — runs eight days this year, through May 6. South Korea's golden holiday, with one well-placed day of leave, runs five. The two windows overlap, almost perfectly, from May 1 through May 5. White-collar workers on both sides of the Korea Strait booked the same week off and bought tickets to each other's countries.
(JTB forecast — the largest figure since the pandemic)
JTB, Japan's largest travel agency, expects 570,000 Japanese travelers to leave the country this Golden Week, the highest figure since the pandemic. According to a separate survey from HIS, another major Japanese agency, bookings to South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are up more than 20 percent year-on-year. Koreans are flying to Japan; Japanese travelers are flying to Korea. Same routes. Same week.
Pricing on those routes is not pulled in one direction but two. The Financial News, reporting from Tokyo, tracked one Nagoya–Busan ticket as it climbed in a matter of weeks from 450,000 won to 600,000 to 720,000 — a roughly 60 percent jump. Some routes did not just get more expensive; they were quietly cancelled. With seats finite and demand surging from both ends, airlines kept the routes that priced well and shed the rest.
One more variable sits on top of all this. Tensions in the Middle East pushed Korean carriers to roughly triple their fuel surcharges in April. The one-way surcharge on Incheon–Tokyo flights jumped from 21,000 won to 57,000. It's billed separately from the base fare, which means the same seat costs different amounts depending on the day you swipe your card.
The fallout has begun to redirect itself. Yonhap News reported last week that the combined weight of fares and surcharges has pushed a slice of would-be travelers off airplanes entirely. Booking rates at hotels and resorts in Gangwon and Jeju — Korea's coastal and island provinces — have climbed visibly. A long weekend, it turns out, is not just about leaving. It's about quietly recalculating where you can afford to go.
One practical note before you close the tab: if you're plotting a Japan trip later this year, aim for the days after May 7 rather than the middle of the holiday. Crowds thin within a day or two of Golden Week's end, and prices revert to normal almost as quickly. Tourist counts in cities like Fukuoka drop by roughly 40 percent the week after. Same city, different country.
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