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Trace Korea

Official-data guides for planning your trip to Korea.

DATA & METHODOLOGY

How Trace Korea reads Korea's public travel data

Trace Korea helps travelers decide when to visit Korea and where to go in a given month. Our month and season pages combine three kinds of public Korean data: regional visitor estimates from the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO), weather observations from the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), and public holidays from official notices. This page explains what each one measures, how we compare periods, and what we do not claim.

How a page is made

Software collects the public data and calculates every figure a page may use, rounded and linked to its source, before any writing begins. Articles are drafted with the help of an AI language model working only from that prepared material; the draft does not calculate new numbers. Automated checks then compare every number and date in the draft with the prepared material and test the visitor wording rules below. A human editor reviews and approves every article before it is published. Automated output is not treated as verified evidence, and no unreviewed draft can be published.

KTO DataLab regional visitor estimates

The KTO Tourism DataLab publishes daily regional visitor estimates through Korea's public data portal (data.go.kr dataset 15101972). They are derived from mobile network data and come in two separate types, which we never mix in the same figure:

  • Estimated daily foreign visitors in a region.
  • Estimated domestic visitors from outside the area: people in Korea who are present in a region outside their usual daily living area.

These are estimates, and their limits matter:

  • They are not tourist counts. The data does not record why someone is in a region; business travel, family visits and transit are included.
  • They are not counts of unique people. A visitor who stays three days appears on each of those three days, so we do not add daily values into monthly or yearly “visitor” totals or convert them into numbers of people.
  • They do not measure street crowding, queues or how busy a particular place feels. A district-level figure covers the whole district, not a single street or attraction.
  • They are not added across administrative levels. A city or district value is part of its province's value, so we never combine them, and we do not combine regions whose figures are produced on different bases.
  • When an administrative area is merged or its code changes, the old and new areas are kept as separate series rather than joined into one.

How we compare periods

Months. For each region and visitor type, we calculate the month's average estimated visitors per day and compare it with the average per day over the twelve months ending with that month, for the same region and the same visitor type. We calculate a monthly average only when every day of that month is present in the data, and we state the number of observation days behind each comparison.

Holiday windows. For a holiday period, such as Christmas or New Year, we compare each day with the preceding four observations on the same weekday that were not public holidays. When two holiday windows sit close together, both use a baseline taken before the first window, so one holiday does not become the baseline for another. A value of 130 is reported as “30% above the preceding four same-weekday observations”, not as “30% more crowded”. When something such as a festival coincides with a higher value, we write that visitation was higher during that period, not that the event caused it.

Every figure names its region, dates, visitor type and comparison. Where we have only one year of data for a month, we name the year (for example, “in December 2025”) and do not describe it as what happens every year.

Publication lag

KTO DataLab figures usually become available about four weeks after the dates they describe. A page about a coming month therefore shows the most recent complete year we have, labeled by year. The figures describe what happened in that period; they are not a forecast of the next one.

Weather observations

Temperatures, snow days and seasonal observations such as first snow come from KMA observation records for named weather stations. We report observed dates and values for a stated year, in both Celsius and Fahrenheit. They are records of past weather, not forecasts.

Public holidays and key dates

Korean public holidays come from official notices, including the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute's special-day data and the government's official calendar announcements. Holiday periods in other countries that may affect travel to Korea come from those governments' own official notices. A date appears on a page only after it has been confirmed in two independent official sources; if a date has not yet been announced, we say so. Our Sources Policy sets out these rules.

What Trace Korea does not claim

  • We do not present forecasts as facts. Past patterns are shown as past patterns, with their year.
  • We do not publish crowd levels, “busiest day” rankings or comparisons of how crowded one district is against another.
  • We do not estimate tourist numbers, spending, bookings or revenue from visitor estimates.
  • Missing values stay missing. We do not fill gaps with model guesses.

If you find a figure that does not match its source, please tell us through the Contact page; corrections are handled under our Corrections Policy.