Seattle → Seoul flights

Budget $420–$470 for Seattle–Seoul — and act before fares spike

Key takeaways

• Median fare is $423 across 30 daily snapshots — a reliable anchor for budgeting this route.
• Bottom-quartile fares hit $368 or below (p25), meaning roughly one in four sampled fares came in meaningfully cheaper than the median.
• The high end reaches $621 — a 72% spread between low and high signals this route has real price volatility, so timing matters.
• The $362–$473 band (low to p75) covers most realistic booking outcomes; fares above $473 represent the pricier quarter of observations.
• No dominant carrier was identifiable from this dataset, so comparing across airlines on any given search date is worth the extra two minutes.

30-day price trend

See full numbers and stats on the SEA → ICN price history page.

The full picture

Seattle–Seoul is a competitive transpacific corridor, and the 30-day fare snapshot reflects that tension clearly. The median of $423 sits comfortably close to the 25th percentile of $368, which tells you the distribution is skewed upward — cheap fares cluster tightly in the low-$360s to low-$400s, while the expensive tail stretches all the way to $621. That 72% spread is wide enough to matter: the difference between a bottom-quartile fare and a high observation is nearly $260 on a single ticket. This is not a route where any fare in the ballpark is essentially the same price.

On transpacific routes of this distance, fare history generally shows that prices firm up inside 30 days as remaining seat inventory tightens, and that windows of 6–10 weeks out tend to surface more fares in the lower quartile range. The $362–$368 floor observed here is not a permanent feature of the market — it likely reflects periodic promotional or off-peak inventory that doesn't persist for long. If you're seeing fares at or below $390, the data suggests that's closer to the bottom of what this route realistically offers, and waiting for something dramatically lower carries meaningful risk of landing in the $470–$621 range instead.

Because no single dominant carrier emerged from this dataset, it's worth running a fresh search across multiple airlines rather than defaulting to a preferred carrier — fare leadership on SEA–ICN shifts, and the cheapest option on one date may not be cheapest a week later. One honest caveat: 30 snapshots capture a single rolling window and may not reflect seasonal swings around major Korean holidays (Chuseok, Lunar New Year) or summer peak, when fares on this route have historically climbed well above the high observed here. Treat $423 as a fair-weather median, not a year-round guarantee.

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