San Francisco → Seoul flights

SFO–Seoul: Target $397 and book before fares climb toward $494

Key takeaways

• Median fare: $397 — that's your baseline; half of observed prices came in at or below this level.
• Bottom-quartile threshold: $396 — the gap between p25 and the median is razor-thin, meaning truly cheap fares don't linger long.
• High end reached $494 — a 29% spread between low and high signals real volatility; waiting too long carries measurable risk.
• Low of $384 — the floor is only $13 below the median, so dramatic last-minute discounts are not what this route rewards.
• No dominant carrier signal was visible in the data, so comparison-shopping across all nonstop and one-stop options remains important.

30-day price trend

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

The full picture

The SFO–Seoul fare landscape is defined by a narrow floor and a meaningful ceiling. With a median of $397, a p25 of $396, and an observed low of just $384, the cheapest fares cluster tightly — there's only a $13 gap between the very bottom and the midpoint of the distribution. That tells you two things: genuinely cheap fares do exist on this route, but they don't represent a dramatic outlier you can hunt for indefinitely. When you find something in the $384–$400 range, the data suggest pulling the trigger rather than waiting for a further dip.

The more instructive signal is on the upside. The p75 sits at $435 and the observed high reaches $494 — a 29% spread from low to high. This is a moderate-to-wide range for a transpacific route, and it indicates that fares can escalate substantially as departure windows tighten or demand spikes. Historically, transpacific routes tend to see their sharpest price increases inside the 3–4 week window before departure, but the data here don't include booking-lead timestamps, so that general pattern should be treated as background context rather than a firm rule derived from this dataset.

Without a dominant carrier emerging from the snapshot data, there's no basis for routing loyalty on price grounds alone. That means running a side-by-side comparison across carriers — particularly Korean Air and Asiana on the nonstop, and the various one-stop options through East Asian hubs — is worth a few extra minutes. One honest caveat: 30 daily snapshots capture cached lowest fares at a point in time and may not reflect real-time seat availability or dynamic pricing changes. Use $397 as your target anchor, treat anything under $400 as a strong buy signal, and consider $435 (the p75 threshold) the point where you're paying above the typical market.

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