Seollal, and What It Does to a Trip to Korea

By Nicole Damiano, ASTA Verified Travel Advisor with FG Luxury Travel · Updated October 2026

January 1st in Korea is a day off. Seollal is the one that stops the country.

It is the lunar new year, so it moves. In 2027 the holiday runs February 6th to 9th with the new year itself falling on the 7th. In 2028 it comes early, on January 26th and 27th. That movement is the first thing to know, because a February trip to Seoul in one year is completely ordinary and in another year lands right on top of the biggest travel week Korea has.

If your dates touch it, the trip is not ruined. It is different, and some of it is better than the ordinary version. But you need to know which parts.

What closes

Small restaurants close. Independent shops close. A lot of the places you were looking forward to in a neighborhood like Ikseon dong or Yeonnam dong are family businesses, and the family is somewhere else eating tteokguk with their grandparents.

Department stores and the big chains mostly keep going, and so do the convenience stores, so nobody goes hungry. What you lose is the small and the good, which for a lot of people is the entire reason they came.

The pattern is worth understanding. It is not a shutdown by decree, it is millions of people going home to their families at the same time. Korea empties out of the cities.

Which means the closures are patchy rather than total, and they are worst in the residential neighborhoods and lightest around the hotels, the stations and the big shopping districts. Myeongdong keeps moving. The tiny place you saved on Instagram three months ago probably does not.

What is open, and free

This is the part almost nobody plans for and it is the best thing about the holiday.

During Seollal the four grand palaces in Seoul open with free admission. Gyeongbokgung, Changdeokgung, Deoksugung and Changgyeonggung. So does Jongmyo Shrine, so do all forty royal tombs, and so do most of the national museums.

They also run programs. Traditional games, craft workshops, performances, at places like Namsangol Hanok Village and inside Gyeongbokgung itself. Children are the target audience for a lot of it, which is not something you can say about most of what happens in a palace.

Two catches, both easy to miss. The National Museum of Korea closes on the day of Seollal itself even though it is open around it. And the palaces and royal tombs take their closing day immediately after the holiday, so the day everyone assumes is the safe one is the day the gates are shut.

What Seollal is, so you know what you are looking at

Families gather, they hold a memorial for their ancestors, the children bow to their elders and get money for it, and everybody eats tteokguk, a soup of sliced rice cake in broth. Eating it is tied up with turning a year older, which is a nice thing to explain to a child on the day.

You will see hanbok everywhere over those days, including on people who have hired it for the afternoon, and there are traditional games set up in public spaces that anyone can join. Yut nori involves throwing four sticks and shouting, and it travels well across a language barrier.

None of that is put on for tourists, which is exactly why it is worth being there for.

Eating over the two quiet days

Hotel restaurants run. The big chains run. Department store food halls run, and in Korea those are very good. The convenience stores never close and a CU or GS25 will feed a family perfectly well at eleven at night.

What you want to avoid is arriving at seven in the evening on Seollal day with a list of four small restaurants and no plan. Pick your two holiday dinners in advance and confirm them, and let the rest of the week be spontaneous.

The travel week is the real problem

Everybody moves at once. Trains and buses out of Seoul before the holiday and back into it afterwards are the busiest of the year, KTX seats sell out well in advance, and the expressways turn into something people compare notes about afterwards.

If you are staying put in Seoul across those days you barely notice. If you had planned to do Seoul, then Busan, then Gyeongju with a train in the middle of that week, book the seats early or move the legs.

So how do you plan around it

If your dates are movable, going the week after Seollal is the easy answer. Everything reopens, the crowds are gone and prices settle.

If they are not movable, stay in one city across the holiday itself, use the free palace days deliberately rather than by accident, book any long distance train the moment seats open, and accept that your restaurant list needs a plan B for two of those days.

And if you have children with you, the palace programs are worth building the days around. It is the one week of the year when a five hundred year old palace is running games for kids in the courtyard.

The part I would think about

Seollal is not a reason to avoid Korea. Turning up without knowing it is happening is the problem, and that is easier to do than it sounds, because it moves every year and it does not appear on the calendar you are looking at when you book flights in June.

Check the lunar dates against your travel dates before anything is paid for. If they overlap, that changes which city you base in, which days you move, and what you book ahead.

If you would rather have someone else hold all of that, that is what I do. Tell me your dates and who is coming.

Keep reading

The long version of all of this is my South Korea family travel guide, which covers Seoul, Busan and Jeju and the practical side of travelling there with children.

If Japan is in the same trip, and for most families it is, here is how to split the days between the two countries and what happens in Japan over New Year, which is a completely different set of closures from this one.