Where Tourists Go in Seoul Now: Myeongdong vs Seongsu

Ask a Korean where tourists go in Seoul and you will hear one answer: Myeongdong. Ask someone who has been to Seoul twice since 2024 and you will hear another: “Have you been to Seongsu?” Both are right, and the data shows why.

This article puts several sources side by side: the government’s official International Visitor Survey, Seoul’s living-population data (which we processed ourselves, dong by dong), card spending, subway ridership and shop vacancy rates. Each source measures something different, so read each chart’s label carefully. For the bigger picture of who visits Korea, see our Numbers pages on what visitors do and who visits Korea most.

Is Myeongdong still the most popular place for tourists in Seoul?

Yes. Myeongdong is the place foreign visitors name most often as their favourite, and its lead grew in 2025. In the 2025 International Visitor Survey, run by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) and the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute (KCTI) with 16,110 departing visitors, 17.3% picked Myeongdong as their favourite place, up from 16.1% in 2024. Provisional figures for April–June 2026 put it at 18.3%.

Other measures agree that Myeongdong is still the busiest tourist district by far:

• Foot traffic: the Seoul AI Foundation, analyzing roaming and arrival data, counted an average of 100,910 foreign visitors a day in Myeongdong in 2025, ahead of N Seoul Tower (57,370), Samseong Station and COEX (46,813), Gangnam Station (41,210) and Hongdae (40,213) (Newsis, July 2026).
• Subway: Myeongdong Station had the most foreign riders on Seoul Metro’s network in 2024, 2,747 a day, ahead of Hongik University Station (1,692) and Euljiro 1-ga (1,216) (Seoul Metro data reported by Financial News).

How fast is Seongsu growing with foreign tourists?

Its share of “favourite place” answers has roughly doubled every year since 2023. In 2025, the survey report noted, Seongsu rose among visitors from every country it tracks. The provisional April–June 2026 figure, 9.6%, is almost double the 5.2% of the same quarter a year earlier.

Japanese visitors lead the trend: 11.5% of them named Seongsu their favourite place in 2025. By group, Seongsu scored highest with women (7.0%), people in their twenties (8.7%) and visitors on their fourth trip or more (7.0%). In other words, Seongsu is where repeat visitors go once they have done the classics.

🌏 Share of visitors naming Seongsu their favourite place, by country (2025 International Visitor Survey)

Myeongdong is the opposite story by country: Hong Kong (26.9%) and Thai (25.2%) visitors named it most strongly, and for Thai, Vietnamese and French visitors, Gyeongbokgung Palace ranked near the top.

Why Seongsu? It packs the things repeat visitors search for into a few walkable blocks: K-beauty flagships, Korean designer fashion, pop-up stores and warehouse cafés. CJ Olive Young says foreign customers made up about 70% of sales at its six Seongsu stores in October 2025, up from about 40% before its flagship opened. For where to go once you are there, see our guides to Seongsu cafés and old vs new restaurants in Seongsu.

What does Seoul's own data say about where tourists are?

Seoul’s living-population data shows about the same number of short-term foreign visitors in the city as before the pandemic, spread across more neighbourhoods. We downloaded the Seoul Open Data Plaza dataset for short-term foreign stays (estimated from public and telecom data) and averaged every hour of July for each administrative dong. July 2019 and July 2026 are both full months, so they compare like with like.

📊 Short-term foreign visitors present at an average hour in July, by administrative dong (SeoulWindow calculation)

Three things stand out. Myeongdong dropped sharply between July 2017 and July 2019 and has been roughly flat since. The old shopping belt around it (Sogong-dong, Namdaemun, Dongdaemun) is still well below 2019. Meanwhile Seongsu, Yeouido (the Hyundai Seoul and the Han River parks) and Apgujeong (Gangnam’s designer streets and clinics) have grown.

A Dong-A Ilbo analysis of the same kind of data, covering 15 tourist areas during peak months from 2017 to 2025, reached the same conclusion: hourly foreign visitors fell in Myeongdong (16,034 → 9,843), Dongdaemun (4,194 → 2,746) and Namsan (1,308 → 796), and rose in Hongdae and Sinchon (3,854 → 4,794), Jamsil (2,382 → 3,901), the Yeouido and Banpo Han River parks (2,046 → 2,673), Gwangjang Market (387 → 806) and Seongsu (93 → 2,257). Its areas are drawn differently from administrative dongs, which is why its numbers differ from ours.

Where do foreign tourists spend the most money in Seoul?

Feet are spreading out, but wallets still go mainly to Myeongdong and Gangnam. Seoul city’s figures for April 2026, based on Korea Tourism Organization card data, put Gangnam-gu (29.1%) and Jung-gu, home of Myeongdong (27.5%), far ahead of Mapo-gu (7.4%), Seocho-gu (6.5%) and Jongno-gu (5.5%) in foreign card spending. Shopping made up 45.4% of that spending and medical and wellness 24.8%.

Seongsu’s district is catching up fast. MoneyS, using Korea Tourism Data Lab figures, reported that foreign card spending in Seongdong-gu reached ₩461.3 billion in January–September 2026, slightly more than Jongno-gu (₩457.2 billion), even though Jongno had more than twice as many visitors (9.99 million vs 4.55 million). Spending per visit was about ₩101,000 in Seongdong against ₩46,000 in Jongno.

Is Myeongdong dying?

No. Myeongdong emptied out during the pandemic and then refilled. According to Cushman & Wakefield, whose figures cover Myeongdong’s main streets, the retail vacancy rate went from 4.5% in 2019 to a peak of 52.5% in the first half of 2022, then fell back to 4.4% by the end of 2024, and was 4.4% again in the second quarter of 2026. In the same quarter Seongsu was at 4.5% and Hongdae at 10.4%.

What changed is what fills the shops. The Chinese tour-group economy of the 2010s, with duty-free stores and cosmetics road shops, gave way to K-beauty multi-brand stores, sneaker and fashion stores and street food aimed at independent travelers from all over Asia and beyond. We tell that story in where Myeongdong’s road shops went.

What does this mean for your Seoul trip?

One more number from the 2025 survey: overall satisfaction was 97.5%, but “language communication” was the lowest-rated infrastructure item at 79.3%. Myeongdong’s shop staff are used to English, Japanese and Chinese; in a Seongsu side street, a translation app will do more of the work.