Seoul Fever: Why So Many Tourists Say They Get 'Sick' for a City They Just Left
Tearful airport-train clips on Chinese social media helped spread a slang term — 'Seoul sickness' — that K-pop fans picked up and Busan's tourism board later borrowed for a campaign. Here's where it came from, and whether the repeat-visit data backs it up.
How "Seoul Sickness" Took Off
In mid-September 2025, Korean news outlets began reporting that 서울병 (首尔病, "Seoul sickness") was spreading among young people on Chinese social media. A Douyin video titled 서울병이 심해졌다 — "my Seoul sickness got worse" — was reported to have drawn hundreds of thousands of likes (Newsis; Dong-A Ilbo put it above a million). Another widely shared post showed someone tearing up on the airport train as the trip ended. A year later, Korean tourism coverage is still using the phrase.
1The Clips Themselves
- According to Yonhap TV, one Douyin user posted a clip of themselves tearing up on AREX, the train that runs to Incheon International Airport, with a caption saying that if you ask what Seoul sickness is, it's the tears you can't stop on the ride to the airport. It wasn't dramatic — the caption did the work.
- Chinese outlets covered the trend too. Per Dong-A Ilbo, Tencent News tied it to things like smoke-free subways and safe, convenient city systems, while the weekly Southern Weekly described it as a psychological gap between the trip and ordinary life back home.
2The Replies Became Their Own Genre
- The comment section turned into a genre of its own. Newsis quoted commenters who tearfully scrolled back through their trip photos, called Seoul the happiest trip of their lives, or described a Korean stranger who helped when they got lost. On Xiaohongshu, posts under the same hashtag daydreamed about living in Seoul for good and about the karaoke rooms and pojangmacha tents near the university areas.
Context from the same coverage: Korea's temporary visa-free entry for Chinese group tourists (groups of three or more, up to 15 days) was set to start on September 29, 2025 — initially through June 2026 — just ahead of China's October 1–8 national holiday.
3It Doesn't Stay at the Airport
- A year on, Seoul Economic Daily says the term spread in particular after Chinese visitors who came to Seoul for K-pop concerts posted, once back home, that their Seoul fever had flared up again. It describes the state of missing the city once a trip ends and wanting to go back.
Busan Caught It Too
"Busan Fever" followed the same pattern — an organic nickname on Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese social media for missing Busan right after a trip there, which the Busan Tourism Organization then adopted outright for its own marketing rather than trying to compete with it.
6.07M
International passengers through Gimhae Airport in H1 2026 — an all-time high, about 1 million above the pre-pandemic H1 2019 record of 5.08 million.
+45.5%
Year-over-year growth in foreign arrivals through Gimhae in Q1 2026 alone — roughly 430,000 people.
+190%
Growth in Busan-related searches in Japan over the past year, per Google Trends as reported by Seoul Economic Daily. Searches for the English term "Busan" were up about 50%.
The City Leaned Into It
In the first quarter of 2026, foreign arrivals through regional airports nationwide were up 40.1% versus the same period in 2019 — more than double the 19% growth at the Seoul metro-area airports (Yanolja Research, as reported). Gimhae's first-half international passengers broke down as Japan (2.59 million), Vietnam (1.03 million), Taiwan (946,000), and China (599,000) — all passengers on the airport's international flights, not only foreign visitors. Faced with a nickname tourists had already coined for free, the Busan Tourism Organization teamed up with the travel platform KKday on a one-month "Busan Fever Healing" promotion that sorted the "fever" into early, progressing, and terminal stages, with different tours and travel packages recommended for each.
Does the Slang Actually Match the Data?
Internet nicknames are cheap to coin and easy to forget. What's less common is a slang term that is still around a year later, alongside a travel platform's actual booking data pointing the same way — which is what happened here.
#4 in Asia
Seoul's rank for repeat travel in Agoda's first-half-2026 booking analysis — behind only Tokyo, Bangkok, and Bali. Busan placed 21st, up from 25th the year before.
10.71M
Foreign visitors to Korea in H1 2026, up about 21% from the same period in 2025.
90.5 points
Provisional visitor satisfaction score for Q2 2026, up from 89.8 a year earlier — a small move, but a move in the direction the slang would predict.
₩10 trillion+
Foreign credit-card spending in Korea passed this mark about three months earlier in 2026 than it did in 2025.
What the Ranking Actually Measures
Agoda's repeat-destination ranking isn't counting viral videos — it's built from the platform's own first-half booking data, which makes it a genuinely separate data source from a Douyin trend. That two very different kinds of evidence — one anecdotal and emotional, one a platform crunching its own transaction data — are pointing at the same conclusion is the more interesting part of this story than either one alone.
Not a Diagnosis
"Seoul fever" and "Busan fever" started as slang, not survey categories, and a tourism board reusing a nickname doesn't make it a clinical term — it makes it good marketing. The underlying feeling the phrase is joking about, though, is the same thing Agoda's ranking is measuring in a much drier way: people who visited once and are already planning to come back. One version of that shows up as a caption under a crying selfie on the way to the airport. The other shows up in a quarterly earnings-style report nobody outside the travel industry reads.
⚠ The clips and the captions are Chinese-language internet culture specifically — this hasn't been shown to be a global pattern, just a heavily documented one. Whether it lands the same way for a first-time visitor from the US, Southeast Asia, or India is the open question, not a settled fact.
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