Earlier this year, when I was planning for our Seoul holiday, I wanted to focus on enjoying Korean food, visiting local markets and admiring traditional architecture.
We usually spend quite a bit of effort planning our overseas travel, and this trip was no exception. I crafted a day-by-day itinerary that listed out places to eat, things to do and sights to see.
It wasn’t cast in stone though. After landing at our destination, we’re quite flexible on the agenda for any given day. If we happen to chance upon something interesting, we’re perfectly happy to deviate from our original plan.
Itinerary
You can find the entire collection of blog posts covering different parts of our trip. For a quick overview, here’s our overall itinerary.
As you can see, we adopt a relaxed pace when travelling. We try not to do too many things or visit too many places in one day.
Every morning, we wake up fairly late, drink our coffee with a light breakfast in our hotel room and then head out for an early lunch.
This is followed by an afternoon of sightseeing and shopping in one to two neighbourhoods, before having an early dinner. We do stay out late some nights, but we’re usually back in our hotel room by 9pm.
I suppose you could say that it’s not the most “efficient” way to travel. We could have completed our itinerary in half the duration, but we prefer to take our time.
Flight
Our flights are typically in economy class, especially to regional countries that are less than eight hours away. It’s just nice for a comfortable daytime flight that reaches our destination in the evening.
But ever since we started to seriously accumulate frequent flier points, we’ve found ourselves with sufficient miles to redeem for the occasional business class seats on Singapore Airlines.
It would be tempting to say that tickets to Incheon Airport cost us S$234. But that only covers the cash outlay for taxes, surcharges and miles conversion fees.
A more accurate way would be to account for the opportunity cost of earning the miles needed to redeem for those seats. For example, by calculating the credit card cashback “sacrificed” in favour of earning miles.
Based on my miles-earning credit cards, I can reasonably get 4 miles for every dollar spent. So, to earn the 208,000 KrisFlyer miles required, I would have had to charge S$52,000 in total.
If that same amount was channelled to a credit card that earned 1.7% cashback instead, I would have “earned” S$884 in cash. Which I could then use to pay for plane tickets.
Using this logic, the cost of our flight was actually S$884 (in cashback opportunity cost) plus S$234 (in taxes, surcharges and fees), or around S$1,120 for a pair of return business class tickets.
Given that a pair of return economy class airline tickets from Singapore to Seoul typically costs S$1,200 to S$1,400 depending on airline flown, it’s clear why we’re loyal fans of Team Miles.
Hotel
Back in the day, when I used to be a salaryman flying overseas for work, I frequently stayed in 20sqm rooms of business hotels.
It was perfectly acceptable as I was travelling alone and only needed a place to sleep. But when The Wife and I are on vacation, we don’t mind spending more for a room that’s at least 30sqm.
For Seoul, I had chosen to split our stay between two hotels: Ryse Hongdae in the west, and Novotel Dongdaemun in the east.
Our Editor Room in Ryse cost ₩1,445,000 for 5 nights. It was located right in the heart of Hongdae, but the layout of the 35sqm room was typical of most hotels.
The Residence Deluxe Room at Novotel, on the other hand, was a spacious 53sqm one bedroom suite with a kitchen and washer/dryer. All for the price of ₩1,025,000 for 4 nights, 11% cheaper than Ryse on a nightly basis.
Accommodation cost for all 9 nights came up to a total of ₩2,470,000, or around ₩275,000 per night. On hindsight, I should have just booked the Novotel for our entire stay.
There’s even an Airport Bus stop just outside the hotel, making travel from and to Incheon Airport a breeze, even with large luggage.
Food & Drink
Compared to Singapore, the cost of eating out in Seoul was significantly cheaper. I especially liked the fact that the price stated on the menu is the final price that you actually pay.
There are no additional surcharges, taxes or tips. Unlike in Singapore, where the 10% service charge and 8% (soon to be 9%) government tax inflates the final bill by about 20%.
Our favourite meal of the entire trip was definitely the hanjeongsik at Hangaram, where we had delicious seafood and more banchan that we could finish. It only cost ₩66,000 for the both of us, including a bottle of makgeolli.
We ate so much good Korean food in Seoul and paid between ₩30,000 to ₩100,000 per meal. The cheapest one was the pork soup at Donsubaek, and the most expensive was the ganjang gejang at Keun Giwajip.
On average, I estimate that we spent around ₩60,000 across our 15 meals, for a total F&B cost of ₩900,000. It was way less that I had initially expected, especially given the quality and quantity that was served.
Shopping
K-fashion is a huge industry, no doubt driven by the global popularity of K-pop and K-drama. Many tourists enter Seoul with empty suitcases, and then proceed to stuff them with trendy clothes and accessories.
Thankfully, The Wife is not a shopaholic.
But once in a while, she’s mysteriously drawn to certain shops. This time it was Pleats Mama, a Korean company specialising in eco-friendly and sustainable fashion.
She ended up happily buying various colourful pleated bags for family, friends and herself. Her purchases at Pleats Mama accounted for more than half of the ₩700,000 we spent on shopping.
Transport
Seoul is served by an extensive public transport system that comprises an excellent subway and bus network, as well as reasonably-priced taxis.
Our total land transport cost came up to ₩120,000 for the both of us. The bulk of which went to taking the AREX Airport Express train (₩8,000) when we landed, and the Airport Bus (₩34,000) when we departed.
When we moved hotels from Hongdae to Dongdaemun, we took a taxi (₩16,000) only because our luggage wheels had broken. Other than that, we used our Tmoney stored value cards and took the subway and buses (₩62,000) to get around the city.
We used the subway most of the time, but discovered the ease and convenience of taking public buses. The idea was initially quite daunting to us, but we were hooked after trying it for the first time.
Total Cost
Including costs for travel insurance, K-ETA (now not required for many countries, including Singapore) and mobile data roaming, we spent a total of ₩5,450,000 (S$5,450) for our 10 day trip to Seoul.
The majority of our budget went to hotels, because we like to return to a nice and spacious room after an entire day of exploration.
Our flight costs were kept to a minimum, despite being able to fly business class there and back, because we used our Krisflyer miles.
Food and drink was unexpectedly cheap, though it could be due to our comparison with sky-high prices of restaurant meals in Singapore.
And because a pie-chart is so old school and boring, here’s a treemap to visualise the breakdown of our travel expenses. All Singapore dollar (S$) values have been converted to Korean won (₩) for consistency, using an exchange rate of S$1 = ₩1,000.
After being landbound for three and a half years, we finally got to step onto a plane again for our first post-pandemic trip.
Now that it’s done and dusted, I guess there’s only one thing left to do.
Time to plan for our next vacation!
