Friday, October 29, 2004  

Seoul - 11th Most Expensive City 

An article in the Korea Times some days back reported that Seoul is the 11th most expensive city in terms of travel cost.

Here is the link to the Korea Times article. Should this link expire (which it eventually will, no doubt), here's a screenshot of said article preserved in FatMan's vault.

Quote from article - "Three meals in Seoul cost $131.94, the 15th most expensive in the world." (US$ one would assume)

Hmmmm ..... readers here would know that a decent meal can be had for an average cost of USD5.00 - USD10.00, and if you want to splurge, yea maybe even USD20.00. So my attention was directed to this paragraph ... "the report (is) based on materials from Business Travel News, a U.S. travel newspaper". Ahhh ... that explains it. US businessmen travelling to Seoul either got very badly ripped-off OR ate at fancy hotel establishments OR abused their corporate credit cards. Sure, I've been guilty of the latter on rare occasions, but surely the Korea National Tourism Organization (KNTO) is not helping to clarify this, which is sure to scare off any potential inbound tourists.

So FatMan says, NO it won't cost you USD131.94 for 3 meals in Seoul, not unless you eat really really fancy. So welcome to Kimchi-land .... cheers!

While we're on this subject, here's another article in Korea Times circa June 2004 which ranked Seoul as the 7th most expensive city in a Cost Of Living survey conducted by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

Yea I know ... it feels like this ....

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