San Francisco → Seoul flights

SFO–Seoul: Target $425–$436 and book 6–8 weeks out

Key takeaways

• $436 is the median one-way fare across 17 daily snapshots — a reasonable planning anchor for this route.
• The bottom quartile starts at $425, meaning roughly one-in-four observed fares came in at or below that level — not dramatically lower, but worth targeting.
• The high of $494 represents the ceiling seen in this window, about 13% above median — a meaningful but not extreme premium.
• A 25% spread between low ($395) and high ($494) signals moderate price volatility: there is real money to save by timing your purchase, but fares aren't swinging wildly.
• With only 17 daily samples, treat these figures as directional guidance rather than a definitive forecast — more data could shift the median.

30-day price trend

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

The full picture

The SFO–Seoul corridor shows a fairly contained price band. Over 17 daily snapshots of cheapest available cached fares, the cheapest observed fare was $395 and the top of the range reached $494 — a $99 spread, or 25% of the low. That's a moderate level of volatility: meaningful enough that timing your purchase matters, but not so wild that you need to obsessively watch prices every day. The practical takeaway is that fares cluster around the $425–$440 range, with genuine outliers in either direction appearing occasionally rather than predictably.

For booking timing on a transpacific route of this distance, fares on SFO–ICN typically have a window of relative softness roughly 6–10 weeks before departure. Too far out — beyond three months — and carriers often haven't released their most competitive inventory. Too close in — within three weeks — and remaining seats tend to price up. The p25 fare of $425 suggests that patient shoppers checking in that 6–8 week window stand a reasonable chance of landing near the lower end of the observed range, though no snapshot data can guarantee a specific price on a specific future date.

No dominant carrier signal is visible in this dataset, so it isn't possible to make evidence-based claims about which airline is consistently cheapest on this route. The honest caveat here is the sample size: 17 daily snapshots is a workable baseline, but it's thinner than the 30-day window we'd ideally use. A streak of low- or high-fare days in that window could pull the median a bit in either direction. Treat $436 as your planning number, $425 as your target, and set a price alert rather than buying impulsively if you're more than two months out.

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