Went with my family to Seoul and Jeju for a 9 day holiday during the June holidays. Here I will cover how we transit to Jeju from the plane touchdown in Seoul.
First we arrived in Incheon and had to make a transit to Gimpo domestic airport for the domestic flight to Jeju.
So how much time is needed for transit between Incheon and Gimpo?
Reading online guides suggest that sometime between 3 to 4 hours is sufficient. We gave ourselves 3.5 hours and found that to be more than enough with sufficient time to get a quick snack at Gimpo airport!
It is important to know how to use the Naver App since it is more accurate compared to Google Maps. Perhaps due to certain regulations, Google Maps do not provide driving or walking navigation. However, you do need to input Korean characters in Naver App so I use Google Maps to provide the translated text. To find out how I use both interchangeably, see this post!
While we had wanted to take a taxi that will cost around 40k won, I noticed that there were terminals selling limousine bus tickets. The tickets cost us around 22k won for 2 adults and 1 child (note only 6 years and above need pay child fare, under 6 is free!) so it was much cheaper!
The time to reach was about the same as a taxi at about 30+ minutes! The limousine bus was actually quite good because you could store your luggages at the bottom of the bus while you sit comfortably in the bus itself! We had experienced with a taxi where the boot is not large enough for 2 large luggages, so getting the limousine bus guaranteed the storage space!
It is also important to note, Gimpo has an international and domestic terminal so it is important not to alight at the first stop as it is the international one and it is a long distance to the other terminal!
How was the check in process like?
The check in process was pretty straightforward and I think this works for all the local domestic air carriers. Unlike international flights, you do not need to reach like 2 hours earlier before flight time. Checking in 1 hour prior to the flight will do for domestic flights. We printed the boarding pass before going to the luggage check in counters. Note that you need to wait 5 minutes for them to check the luggage for any contraband. One interesting thing I noticed was that they do not care if you bring water on board the plane, probably that rule only applies for international flights.
We had decided whether to engage a private tour guide or rent a car ourselves but my wife decided to do the latter for more freedom. However, since we arrived late, she did not want to start driving in the dark so we had a book a hotel near the car rental shops that were mostly around the Jeju airport.
We decide on Hotel Ventimo that was quite nice and provided nice sandwiches for breakfast!
We went out for dinner and wanted to try black pork. Most restaurants close early so we went for one that was supposed to close at midnight, however it seemed to be closed. We end up heading into any black pork restaurant that was opened. Not sure whether the quality was not as good or we left most of the meat overcooked, it was not as tasty as we first tried black pork years ago. Nevertheless we had our fill and went back to the hotel!
Newly opened KidZania at Sentosa