San Francisco → Seoul flights

Median SFO–ICN fare is $325 — floor sits near $254

Key takeaways

• Median fare: $325 — that's your realistic baseline for SFO–ICN across 30 sampled days.
• Floor of $254 represents the lowest cached fare observed, roughly 22% below median — worth targeting but not guaranteed.
• Tight middle band: p25 is $324, p75 is $325 — meaning half of all observations clustered within $1 of each other, signaling a very stable 'going rate.'
• Spread of 34% (from $254 low to $341 high) is meaningful, but nearly all of it lives in the tails — most days you'll see fares right around $325.
• No dominant carrier was identifiable from this dataset, so comparison-shopping across Korean Air, Asiana, and United is especially worthwhile on this route.

30-day price trend

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

The full picture

The SFO–ICN price landscape is unusual: a 34% spread sounds wide, but the interquartile range collapses to just $1 ($324–$325), which means the vast majority of daily cheapest fares landed almost exactly at $325. In practical terms, $325 is not a 'good deal' or a 'bad deal' — it is simply the market price on most days you check. The outliers at $254 and $341 are real but rare; chasing the floor means checking consistently and being flexible enough to book the moment a sub-$280 fare surfaces.

On booking timing: because the median barely moves day to day, there is no strong signal that a particular lead time reliably unlocks lower fares within this dataset. What the $254 floor does suggest is that periodic promotional or error-fare windows exist on this route — likely tied to airline seat-inventory releases or competitive responses between the carriers serving SFO–ICN nonstop. Setting a fare alert at or below $280 and booking promptly when it triggers is a more defensible strategy than trying to time a specific week.

One honest caveat: 30 snapshots capture a single rolling window and may not reflect seasonal demand shifts — notably summer and Lunar New Year periods, when prices on transpacific routes typically rise well above the $325 median seen here. Treat these figures as a reference point for the conditions when the data was collected, not a year-round guarantee.

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