Ulleungdo's pricing problem — even Korean tourists are leaving

If you've heard the phrase "Korea's Galápagos" in travel articles, it usually refers to Ulleungdo (울릉도) — a volcanic island about 350km off Korea's east coast, near the famous Dokdo islets. It's a place Korean food bloggers used to call "the most beautiful day-trip Korea forgot," and one of the few destinations in the country where international visitors can still see scenery they won't recognize from any drama.

That description is starting to fall apart. In May 2026, Ulleungdo is back in the Korean news for the wrong reason: another wave of pricing scandals so severe that Korean domestic tourists themselves are no longer going.

What's actually happening

The new round of stories started with two viral price tags:

• Dried squid (마른오징어), 170,000 won for one pack on Ulleungdo. The same dried-squid category retails online at around 27,000 won for a 10-piece pack — making the island price 6× over. (Reported by KBS, MoneyToday, May 6 2026.)
• Dokdo shrimp (독도새우), 290,000 won per kilogram. Even within Korea's premium-seafood market, the figure landed online with shock. (News1, May 6 2026.)
• "Fat-streaked pork belly" sold as premium 삼겹살 — an earlier scandal still in living memory among Korean food consumers.

Local merchants pushed back. The Ulleungdo Small Business Association issued a statement on May 7 explaining that "dried squid pricing varies sharply by quality and weight, so simply comparing the number of pieces isn't fair." That's technically true. It's also not the point.

Why this matters even if you weren't planning to go

The most striking number isn't a price — it's the visitor count.

• 2022: 460,000 visitors to Ulleungdo
• 2024: 340,000 visitors
• Net loss: 120,000 people in two years

That's a Korean island losing more than a quarter of its annual visitors — almost entirely Korean. As demand drops, ferry operators are now cutting the regular routes that connect Ulleungdo to the mainland, which makes future visits harder, more expensive, and pushes prices higher again. It's a textbook negative spiral, and it's already in motion.

For international visitors, this is important because Ulleungdo is one of those destinations Korea has spent years quietly hoping to elevate as a "real Korea, not Seoul" experience. Right now it's an example of what happens when a region prices itself out before the world finds it.

If you still want to go (and many still do)

Ulleungdo is genuinely beautiful — sea cliffs, geothermal baths, a unique squid-fishing culture, and a relatively quiet trail network. If it's on your list, here's how to enjoy it without becoming the next viral price-tag photo:

• Photograph the menu before you order. Korean tourism complaint center 1330 specifically uses menu photos as evidence.
• Ask the price per portion before sitting down. Especially for seafood — "kilogram pricing" can balloon a single dish into hundreds of dollars.
• Use the 1330 hotline. The Korea Tourism Organization runs a multilingual complaint line (English, Japanese, Chinese) that handles overpricing reports. Calling it after the fact is normal.
• Cross-check seafood prices on the mainland before you travel — Pohang and Donghae fish markets give you a fair-price baseline for the same items.
• Stick with the ferry-port restaurants and homestays reviewed on Korean blogs (Naver Blog, Mango Plate). Tourist-only spots are where the markup tends to live.

The bigger context

This story belongs to the same pattern The Seoulist has been tracking through 2026:

• The Gwangjang Market 2,000-won cucumber-water incident in April
• Busan stepping in to run public lodging when concert-week hotels became predatory
• Gangneung's citizen-led kindness campaign

Ulleungdo sits at the harder end of this pattern. The market is too small for global pressure, the central government's tourism reform package hasn't reached it yet, and the people losing the most are now domestic Korean travelers — the audience that should have been the easiest to keep.

If you go, you'll likely have a lovely time. Just go in with eyes open: this isn't Jeju, and it isn't Busan. It's an island still figuring out whether it wants tourists or wants to chase them off, and right now it's losing that argument with itself.