🔥 Where Koreans and Visitors Actually Go
Rankings built from Korea Tourism Organization big data — the districts people really visited. Tap a bar to see festivals held there.
Visit data is published about a month late, so the seasonal ranking uses the same month of last year.
Bar length = visit volume · right-hand figure = multiplier on the peak-season tab, 30-day visitor total on the others. How to read these numbers ↓
🌞 Busiest in August
How much busier a district was in August 2025 compared with its own yearly average — a peak-season multiplier. ×1.5 means 1.5× busier than usual. Beaches, valleys and mountains rise here.
📖 How to read these numbers
1. What is being counted
Visitor estimates published by the Korea Tourism Organization, derived from mobile network and card payment data. They are not survey answers or ticket sales — they estimate who actually spent time in an area.
- Residents — people who live in that district. Excluded from these rankings.
- Domestic visitors from elsewhere — Koreans who do not live there. Shown here as "Koreans".
- International visitors — the basis of the "visitors" ranking.
2. Does "17.9M" mean 17.9 million different people?
No. It is a person-day total: daily counts added up over 30 days. Someone who visits on five days is counted five times. Use it to compare scale between districts, not as a headcount.
3. Why do big cities like Gangnam-gu top the list?
Because "visitors from elsewhere" also includes commuting, school, shopping and business trips. Someone who drives in from the next town every morning counts too. So large metro districts are overstated as travel destinations.
For actual travel appeal, use the August peak-season tab — commuters don't change with the seasons, so they cancel out.
4. How the peak-season multiplier (e.g. ×1.54) is calculated
multiplier = average daily visitors in August 2025 ÷ average daily visitors across 2025
Ulleung-gun ×1.54 means Ulleung-gun received 1.54 times its usual daily crowd during August 2025. It measures how much busier than normal a place gets, not raw size — so small towns can rank high in their season.
The "usual" baseline is a daily average sampled evenly across all 12 months of 2025. Districts averaging under 5,000 visitors a day are excluded, since tiny bases produce wild multipliers.
5. Why last year's data?
This data is published about a month late (latest available day: 2026.07.06). Answering "where is busy in August?" with delayed data would return the wrong season entirely. Using the same month of last year matches the season correctly.
The Koreans / international / province rankings compare scale rather than season, so they use the latest 30 days (2026.06.07~2026.07.06).
6. Limitations worth knowing
- These are estimates from telecom and card data, not exact tourist counts.
- Several districts share a name (Jung-gu in Seoul and in Incheon), so the province is always shown.
- Data is per district — it cannot tell you which specific attraction was busy.
📌 Data source
Korea Tourism Organization — Korea Tourism Data Lab, daily visitor counts by district and province
Collected via Tourism Big Data Service (DataLabService) on Korea's public data portal
Periods: peak season August 2025 · visitor rankings 2026.06.07~2026.07.06 · refreshed automatically every Monday