How to make the Seoul Pass work for you.
Most major cities have a citypass type deal where you pay an amount, get a card, and for a set amount of time, you can go popular (and some not so popular) attractions for free or discount. You can easily pay for the pass and not get your moneys worth. This is why you have to do your homework first. I’ve made it work for me in Paris and London. You need to at a minimum break even, but then as a plus, you can tack on some places you maybe would not want to spend money at if you were to pay full price, and check it out.
For Seoul. We knew we wanted to do SM Town, SM Theatre, Namsan Tower, the Hanbok experience, Leeum Museum of Art and maybe the Coex Aqarium. We ended up not doing the Theatre since they were only doing a musical and not the normal SM artist engagements. We figured we would break even after one day and the 2nd day would be a bonus so purchased the 48 hour pass. It starts once you attend your first ‘free’ attraction – So if you start at 2pm on day one, you can use it into day 3 until 2pm.
So here is the normal costs. You can get discounted prices online and other websites like Klook and Trazy but we’ll just go with the at the window prices for comparison.
Day 1 –
SM TOWN – 18,000 WON
Coex Aqarium – 28,000 WON
Day 2 –
Namsan Tower observation deck elevator 10,000 WON
Namsan Tower hanbok cultural experience 18,000 WON
Leeum Museum of Art – 10,000 WON
Day 3 –
Gyeongbokgung Palace -3,000 WON
===87,000 WON is what these attractions would have cost, the Seoul pass cost us $43.50 which is probably around 50,000 won.
We also got a discount at Lotte Tower since all of the discounts from the card are usable even after your time is up. I found out later we could have used the pass on our trip to the airport on the train for 1 free trip too.
In addition, you can buy the card discounted than the published price – we got ours on Trazy. The BTS one was being advertised but it was only a 24 hour pass, and we wanted the 48. It doesn’t matter to me what the picture is on the card ?