If you are going to be in Korea in late September, there is a date you need in your calendar before anything else: 7 September. That is the morning KORAIL opens Chuseok holiday train tickets to the general public, and for the Seoul–Busan KTX it is not even that morning. It is the Friday after.
Chuseok falls on 25 September this year, and the holiday runs 24–26 September. KORAIL treats a five-day block — 23 to 27 September — as the holiday travel period, and tickets for trains running on those five days are not sold the normal way. They come out in a separate reservation round, on a schedule that changes depending on which line you want.
I read the Korean notice and the English one side by side. The English version is helpful, and it also contains a typo that could cost someone a seat. More on that below.
What is actually different about these tickets
Normally you can book a Korean train up to a month ahead, any day you like, and you can walk up to a station counter and buy one. For the Chuseok block, none of that applies.
- Reservations open on fixed dates only, and each date covers a different set of lines
- Station counters do not sell them. The notice says so in plain English: ticket reservations are not available at station counters
- You need a membership account. Not a guest checkout — an account
- Reserving is not the same as buying. Payment happens later, in its own window
That last point catches people out every year. You can win a seat and still lose it four days later by forgetting to pay for it.
The booking calendar, in order
Two rounds, then open sale.
3–4 September, 09:00–15:00 is priority booking. It is limited to passengers with disabilities, seniors, pregnant passengers and national merit recipients, and the person in that category has to be travelling — you cannot use it to book seats for other people. Companions can be added to the same booking, but the tickets carry the priority passenger's name and cannot be refunded separately.
7–11 September, 07:00–13:00 is everyone else. Six hours a day, five days, and each day covers different lines.
11 September at 15:00, whatever is left goes on ordinary sale — app, website and station counters. Non-members can buy here, but payment is immediate.
12–15 September is the payment window for everything reserved in the general round. Pay through the KORAIL+ app or the website by 24:00 on the 15th. Priority-round tickets get until 18 September and can be paid by phone through the customer centre.
Which day is your line? This is the part that matters
The general round is split by line and by departure station. Booking on the wrong day is not a small mistake — you simply cannot see the train.
Read that bottom row again if you are doing the classic Seoul–Busan trip. The Gyeongbu KTX out of Seoul Station is the last slot in the whole schedule, Friday 11 September, and it is the single busiest route in the country during Chuseok. Everyone in the queue that morning wants the same thing you want.
One detail that is easy to miss: the Thursday slot is for trains leaving from and arriving at Suseo. Suseo is the southern Seoul terminus that SRT runs from, and it serves Busan too, on the same Gyeongbu corridor. KORAIL and SR now share one reservation page for holiday tickets, so a Suseo departure is bookable a day earlier than a Seoul Station one. If Suseo is convenient for where you are staying, Thursday is a genuinely easier queue than Friday.
The trade-off is that Suseo is not Seoul Station. Check how you would get there before you decide it is a shortcut.
The English notice has a typo
KORAIL's English notice lists the general booking period as "September 7 (Mon) ~ September 4 (Fri)". September 4 is not a Friday, and it is before the 7th. The Korean version reads 9.7.(월) ~ 9.11.(금), and 11 September is the Friday.
So the correct end date is 11 September. It is an obvious slip once you notice it, but if you were skim-reading the English page and thought the window closed early, you would give up on the whole thing. Worth flagging.
Things that are switched off during this period
This is where a lot of foreign travellers get an unpleasant surprise, because the products they were planning to rely on are not running.
- Standing and non-reserved seats are not sold for these trains. The usual fallback of turning up and buying a standing ticket is gone
- Senior seats, seats for passengers with infants and KTX companion seats are unavailable
- KTX mileage does not accrue, and general-train discount coupons cannot be earned
- Various discount products are suspended for the period
That last line is worth a word of caution. The Korean notice names a few of them — the N-card, internet special fares, travel passes — and the English notice compresses all of it into "various discount products". It does not itemise which passes. If you are holding a KORAIL PASS and were counting on it for a journey between 23 and 27 September, do not assume it works the same way that week. Ring the customer centre on +82-1599-7777 and ask about your specific dates before you build a plan around it.
Practical limits you should know before you sit down to book
- Twelve tickets maximum per person, and no more than six in a single reservation
- Each login gives you a limited window to complete the reservation — three minutes for general customers, longer for priority passengers. The clock is real, and you get logged out when it runs down
- Short-distance journeys are restricted during the reservation period. That includes a long list of metropolitan-area pairs around Seoul, Yongsan, Cheongnyangni, Suseo, Yeongdeungpo, Suwon and Gwangmyeong, among others. You can still pick these up from leftover seats after the 11th
- If you board and then get off at an intermediate station, the fare for the unused section is not refunded
KORAIL also says it will be running macro-blocking software during the period, and that accounts caught using automated booking tools can be suspended or cancelled outright. Book like a human.
Refund fees, since plans change
The cancellation penalty scales sharply as departure approaches.
- Two or more days before departure — a flat KRW 400
- One day before — 5%
- On the day, up to 3 hours before — 10%
- Within 3 hours of departure — 20%
- Up to 20 minutes after departure — 30%
- Up to 60 minutes after — 40%
- After that, until the scheduled arrival time — 70%
Cancelling two days out costs almost nothing, so if you are unsure of a date, booking and then releasing it early is cheap. Cancelling on the day is not.
Before 7 September, do these three things
None of this takes long, and all of it is painful to do at 06:58 on booking morning.
Create the account now. Membership registration is required, and the notice is explicit that holiday reservations are for integrated members only. If you already had a standalone SR account from a previous trip, it will not work — you have to convert it to an integrated account first. Do that this week, not on the day.
Practise on the dedicated page. KORAIL opened the holiday reservation site for a trial run from 24 August, and it is open again on 5–6 September. The interface is different from the normal booking flow and there is a queue system in front of it. Clicking through it once with no pressure is worth more than reading any guide, including this one.
Decide your line and station first. Write down which day you are allowed to book, and set an alarm for 06:50 that morning. If your route appears on two different days — Busan is reachable from both Seoul and Suseo — you get two chances, and the earlier one is less crowded.
If you miss it entirely
You are not stranded. Leftover seats go on continuous sale from 15:00 on 11 September through the app, the website and station counters, and cancellations keep trickling back in right up to departure. Express buses are a separate system and were never part of this schedule. And Chuseok traffic runs in a fairly predictable direction — out of Seoul before the holiday, back into it afterwards — so a train going the unpopular way on any given day is often wide open.
Trying to work out what will actually be open while you are here? The holiday itself is short but it changes the rhythm of the city, and I have written separately about Korea's 2026 public holidays and why Chuseok gets no substitute day this year.
Two other things worth reading before a September trip: the Climate Card and M-Pass comparison if you are moving around Seoul a lot, and what Seoul actually costs at published prices if you are still building the budget.
The short version
- Travel period 23–27 September; Chuseok itself is 25 September
- General booking 7–11 September, 07:00–13:00, different lines each day
- Seoul–Busan KTX is last, on Friday 11 September. Suseo departures open Thursday 10 September
- Membership required, integrated account only, no station-counter reservations
- Pay between 12 and 15 September or lose the seat
- No standing tickets, no non-reserved seats, discount products suspended
- Leftover seats from 15:00 on 11 September
Dates and rules here come from KORAIL's own notices and can be revised. Check the notice board before you book.
Sources: KORAIL, "2026 Chuseok Holiday Train Ticket Reservations" (English notice, 14 August 2026) and the Korean notice of 13 August 2026, plus the holiday reservation site at bt.korail.com. Checked 27 August 2026.
