Seoul is a vibrant city filled with a mix of traditional and modern culture, endless food and street markets, shopping, bustling nightlife, and a focus on beauty and skincare. It’s also a massive city, so if you don’t want to spend all of your precious time on public transit, it’s important to stay in the area that best suits your priorities. Since you can find good food all over the Seoul, I’ve focused on a few primary travel needs besides that.

Best for Sightseeing in Seoul: Insadong & Gwanghamun

Insadong and the areas directly surrounding it are home to Seoul’s main tourist sights, including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Bukchon Hanok Village, Insadong Culture Street, and the Myeongdong Shopping Street. So if you want to be walking distance to these sights, you can stay in this area. There’s also plenty to see just walking around, with lots of beautiful public squares and parks, traditional tea houses, antique shops and narrow neon lit streets scattered throughout.

While there are small pockets of bars and pochas or Korean drinking establishments, these areas are much quieter at night than other nightlife districts like Hongdae, Itaewon, or Gangnam, so you might be paying more in taxi fares to get home late at night if you decide to go out.

Hotels around Insadong & Gwanghamun

We stayed right next to Insadong at the Four Seasons in Gwanghamun most recently using a corporate rate and loved the convenient location directly next to the subway and walking distance to all the tourist sights. The views from the room are incredible (especially from the premier king room on a high floor as pictured below), and the breakfast buffet and speakeasy bar are great.

You can check out Shilla Stay in Gwanghamun for a more affordable option. There’s also a location of the stylish, budget hotel chain Moxy in Insadong if you want to save money but still want cool decor and a rooftop.

Best for Shopping & Nightlife: Hongdae

If you came to Seoul for a good time, I highly recommend staying in the young, artsy neighborhood of Hongdae. It’s a little further from the main tourist areas (about 40 min subway ride), but you can easily stay in Hongdae an entire weekend and still have a list of restaurants, shopping streets, and bars to explore. Since Hongik University is in this neighborhood, prices are generally more affordable, and there are loads of activities to do well into the night from bars and clubs to even photo studios and an arcade that’s open until 3AM. You’ll find almost all of the same brands that you might find in Myeongdong also have locations in Hongdae, including 5 branches of skincare mega chain Olive Young.

Hongdae is also located on the Airport Railroad Express (AREX) all stop train line and is closer to the airport than other neighborhoods, so you can take public transportation for less than 5,000 won (US$4) per person and get from Incheon International Airport to Hongik University station in an hour. Now if you’re like us and you’re running late for your flight because you just couldn’t pull yourself from your last delicious dinner, you could instead spend 50,000 (US$40) won for a taxi that takes 40 minutes 😅

Our Hotel in Hongdae

We stayed 3 nights at RYSE, a modern (dog-friendly!) boutique hotel that won us over with it’s combination of aesthetically pleasing design in every corner, comfy beds, thoughtfully placed switches, sustainable toiletries and water dispensers, and a gorgeous bathroom complete with a waterfall shower and bidet toilet. The rooftop bar has stunning views of the city (as pictured above!), and RYSE is also part of Marriot Bonvoy’s Autograph Collection so you can earn hotel rewards points.

Best for Beauty: Gangnam

If you’re on a mission to reverse aging, get glass skin and try all of the other k-beauty treatments and facials, then Gangnam might be the best location for you. There’s a huge saturation of clinics here, along with lots of shopping (including for k pop stores), nightlife, and the instagram-famous Starfield Library, so you can get all your beauty treatments and explore in one area. On the down side, Gangnam is far from everything, so it’s best to stay here only if most of your time with be spent in the area.

For beauty treatments, I recommend checking out VS Line Clinic, which is a foreigner-friendly clinic that provides one-on-one consultation with an English-speaking doctor for treatments like Ulthera, Juvelook, Thermage, Rejuran, and more. Stay tuned for a full before/after of my treatments, as it takes a few weeks to see the effects.

Next, read my Top Things to Do in Seoul