✈️ This Summer, Visitors Aren't Coming to Korea for the Palaces — Woody Magazine, Jun. 18, 2026
This Summer, Visitors Aren't Coming to Korea for the Palaces
A record 22 million are expected this year — and what they really want is a fortune reading, a mountain hike, and a bathhouse scrub.
The Korean won is weak. For Koreans, that means a pricier trip abroad. But flip the perspective and the story turns over completely: to a foreign visitor, Korea has suddenly become cheap.
On June 10, the Korea Culture & Tourism Institute, a government research body, projected that 22 million foreigners will visit the country this year — the first time the figure has ever crossed that line. The same report expected outbound trips by Koreans to fall by 1.8 percent. More people arriving than ever before; fewer leaving. The direction of travel has reversed.
But the number isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is what those 22 million people actually do once they land.
From the Duty-Free Mall to the Back Alley
The short answer: they aren't here for Gyeongbokgung, the grand royal palace at the heart of Seoul — or at least, not only for it. The old picture of tour buses unloading groups straight into duty-free shops is fading. Today most arrivals come alone, phone in hand, drifting through Daiso, Olive Young, and even the museum gift shop. By the first quarter of 2025, independent travelers made up 82.9 percent of all visitors. As group tours gave way to solo trips, the routes shifted too — off the duty-free floor and into the side streets. What they're chasing isn't only a landmark. It's an ordinary Korean day. The weak won only lightened their wallets; what actually drew them here were the dramas, the idols, and social media.
First: A Fortune Reading
Do they really get their fortunes told? They do. Joy Bunch, a 26-year-old American artist, sat down at a saju café in Hongdae during a week-long trip — her first fortune reading ever. She had grown curious after watching the K-pop group ZEROBASEONE have their saju read. For 30 minutes, a Korean reader walked through her career and her relationships. When he raised her relationship with her father, unprompted, she caught herself thinking, "Oh, that's actually pretty true." The Korea Herald recorded the scene firsthand.
She is not an outlier. Saju cafés in Myeongdong and Hongdae hang signs in English, Japanese, and Chinese, keep multilingual readers on hand, or bring in interpreters. The travel platform Korea Travel Easy has booked saju sessions for foreigners since 2020. One Japanese office worker slotted a reading between a shopping run in Seongsu-dong and a dermatology appointment — her third saju in Korea.
Saju is not shamanic divination. It is myeongri, the study of destiny, read from the year, month, day, and hour of your birth. A 30-minute session runs 30,000 to 80,000 won, a drink included. There is a reason people now joke that after K-pop and K-food comes K-fortune.
Second: The Mountains
The mountains tell the same story. Last year, 2.05 million foreigners visited Korea's national parks. Bukhansan — the granite peak that rises improbably inside Seoul — drew 7.53 million visitors of all nationalities, the most of any park in the country, and foreign faces on its summit have become a common sight. At the city's downtown hiking centers, one visitor in three is foreign, and foreign sign-ups for this spring's Seoul Hiking Week jumped 105.9 percent in a single year.
The appeal is unexpected. No bears, no venomous snakes, and a phone signal that holds all the way to the summit. To Koreans these are so obvious they never registered as advantages. The standard way down now ends with makgeolli, a milky rice wine, alongside gimbap (seaweed-and-rice rolls) and cucumber — a ritual foreign hikers have claimed as their own.
Third: The Temple
Beyond the peaks lie the temples. Last year, 55,515 foreigners booked a templestay — an overnight inside a working Buddhist temple — the most ever, past even the pre-pandemic high of 2019. Dawn chanting, baru gongyang (the monks' waste-free formal meal), 108 prostrations: rituals most Koreans never seek out arrive, for a foreign guest, as meditation and a "digital detox." A discounted program this May drew a crowd that was 67 percent in its 20s and 30s. Koreans even have a word for trading a hotel for a mountain monastery — a "templecation."
Fourth: The Scrub
The biggest surprise is the scrub. CNN devoted an article to seshin, the 40-minute Korean body scrub, and its sandpaper-rough "Italy towel." A visitor from Thailand came to lie on the heated table after watching her favorite group, NCT Wish, lounge in a sauna; eating ramyeon and eggs in the lounge afterward, she said it felt "like walking into the screen."
The numbers back her up. After the Netflix film K-pop Demon Hunters, scrub-and-sauna bookings on the platform Klook rose 11 percent. View counts for #Koreanscrub and #Seshin on TikTok and Instagram have climbed more than 300 percent in two years. At the Myeongdong branch of Daiso, where up to 70 percent of shoppers are foreign, sales of the exfoliating "Italy towel" rose 30 percent in the second half of last year alone. The national tourism office now markets ttaemiri as a heritage experience — and some visitors carry the coarse mitt home as a souvenir.
And it doesn't stop there. Hair salons have become destinations: clips of 18-step scalp treatments flood TikTok, and "foreigner-friendly salons" have become a category of their own. After dark, visitors sit along the Han River and cook instant ramyeon bought from a convenience store. Every one of these is something Koreans do on an unremarkable weeknight, without a second thought.
Not Luxury Korea, but Value Korea
The shift shows up in the wallet, too. Foreigners' total spending and number of transactions have both climbed sharply — yet the amount spent per purchase has fallen. Rather than sweeping up luxury goods in a single haul, they savor many small things, one modest pleasure at a time. The weak won didn't build a luxury Korea. It built an affordable one.
The weeknight scenes Koreans find too dull to mention have become, for someone else, a reason to board a plane. That, in the end, is what a record 22 million people are proving.
- Source ↗ Hankyung (Korea Economic Daily) — KCTI international tourism outlook (22M projection, currency, outbound)
- Source ↗ Asia Economy — variables behind the 22M projection (Taiwan, Japan, 6.77M Jan–Apr)
- Source ↗ Korea Business Review — analysis of the per-capita spending shift
- Source ↗ The Korea Herald — firsthand reportage on foreigners' saju readings (cases, prices, booking)
- Source ↗ TellTrip — 2.05M foreign national-park visitors; Seoul Hiking Week +105.9% (Korea National Park Service)
- Source ↗ Wikileaks-Korea — Bukhansan's 7.53M visitors; why foreigners hike in Korea
- Source ↗ Hankyung — 55,515 foreign templestay participants; the "templecation" trend
- Source ↗ CNN — Korea's 40-minute seshin body scrub and the "Italy towel"
- Source ↗ Asia News Network / The Korea Herald — jjimjilbang surge; Klook +11%; Daiso Italy-towel +30%
- Source ↗ Nongmin — the "MU:DS" museum-goods brand and rising foreign purchases
- Hankook Ilbo — independent travelers at 82.9%, shift to local-street shopping (link unverified)
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