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About this tool
Build a prioritised South Korea etiquette briefing covering seniority, drinking rules, subway conduct and photography law.
This guide turns Korean etiquette into a ranked briefing for the situations you will actually be in, built around the one idea that explains most of it: relative age and seniority decide who greets first, who pours, who starts eating and who pays. Tick the restaurants, drinking occasions, subway journeys, palaces, shops, homes, offices and streets on your trip, and it returns the rules that apply, weighted by severity and trip type, with a readiness score for what you already know. Rules with legal consequences — photography and smoking above all — are shown whatever you tick.
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The rules are framed by the relationship that drives them, so they are easier to remember than a flat list.
Photography and smoking are enforced with fines and are shown regardless of your itinerary.
Tick what you already know and the weighted percentage shows how much is still ahead.
No. Tipping is not part of the system: restaurant prices include service, taxis are metered, and leaving change on a table may result in staff bringing it out to you. The narrow exception is a porter at an international hotel chain. Instead of tipping, the Korean equivalent of generosity is paying for the whole table and letting someone else pay next time.
Never pour your own drink, pour for others with two hands, and turn your head away when drinking in front of someone older or senior. Keep an eye on the glasses around you and refill one that has emptied. These apply most strictly at a hoesik, a work dinner, where the sequence of pouring is part of the social structure of the evening.
Photographing someone without their consent can be a criminal matter, and the laws against illegal filming are enforced seriously. Phones sold in Korea make a shutter sound that cannot be disabled, for exactly this reason. Ask before photographing anyone, and keep cameras away from changing rooms, pools, escalators and any situation that could be misread.
Because they are treated as genuinely reserved rather than first-come. The marked seats at the ends of each carriage, and the pink seats for pregnant passengers, stay empty even in a crowded train so that an older or pregnant passenger boarding at the next stop can sit straight down. Sitting there is the mistake most likely to get a visitor spoken to in public.