About Noonchi: How the Noonchi Score Works

We pick out places with no traffic jams, no crowds and easy parking.

Noonchi's data comes from Korean public agencies, so some place information is only available in Korean.

Ever picked a weekend destination only to find the roads jammed, the crowds huge and the car park full when you got there? In Korean, noonchi is the knack of reading a situation and acting one step ahead of everyone else, and that's exactly what this service does for your trip. Based on your starting point and departure time, Noonchi gives every nearby attraction a Noonchi Score (0–100) and shows you first the places where you'll have the least hassle right now.

How to use it

1. Starting point: tap "My location" or search for an address or place.
2. Date and departure time: the default is today, right now. Upcoming weekends, public holidays and special days can be picked straight from the date chips.
3. Travel-time limit: use the slider below the map to choose how far (in hours of travel) you're willing to go.
4. Type: choose only the kinds of places you want: Nature, Parks, History & temples, Exhibitions & performances, Theme parks & activities, or Streets & markets.
5. Already have a place in mind? Use "Add a place yourself" to check conditions for just that spot.

How the Noonchi Score is calculated

• Traffic: using the Korea Expressway Corporation's traffic forecasts and historical congestion patterns by day of the week, public holiday and time of day, we predict how much longer the trip will take than usual if you leave at the time you selected. The longer the delay, the bigger the deduction.
• Crowds: we combine the Korea Tourism Organization (KTO)'s 30-day concentration rate forecast for each attraction, produced from mobile network data (the place's busiest period = 100), with crowd patterns for the time you'll arrive.
• Parking: we predict how easy parking will be from KTO's parking information (number of spaces, or "no parking"), the size of nearby public and private car parks (Korea's national car park database and Seoul's public car park data), and the number of visitors expected at that time on that day.
• Distance and popularity: popularity multiplies the score (see "Putting the score together" below), and distance takes off points the further a trip goes beyond 20 minutes, up to a maximum of 20 points. You can adjust how much these matter with "Long distance" and "Lesser-known places" under "What bothers you more?". Places beyond your travel-time limit (1 hour by default) are left out.
• Weather and sunset: if the Korea Meteorological Administration's short-term forecast calls for rain or snow, sub-zero temperatures or heat above 31°C, outdoor places get a weather deduction (though they also tend to be less crowded). Indoor places get no weather deduction, but on rainy days we assess their crowds and parking more strictly, since that's where everyone goes. For outdoor places where you'd arrive after sunset, we don't lower the score but show a caution instead (a stronger one for mountain trails and waterside spots at night). Late at night, we don't recommend dark outdoor places without set hours, such as mountains and waterfronts.
• Popularity: places that drivers often search for together with other attractions in Tmap, Korea's most widely used car navigation app (KTO related-attractions data), are considered more worth a visit. Set "Lesser-known places" to "Don't mind" under "What bothers you more?" to remove the popularity penalty, and lesser-known spots will rank higher.
• Opening hours: places that are closed for the day or shut by the time you arrive are left out of the recommendations (and shown with their status in the rankings), and places with less than an hour left before closing get a lower score.
• Putting the score together: Noonchi's goal is to get you to well-known places while they're quiet. So the score is "how worth visiting the place is (popularity)" × "how quiet it is right now", minus a distance deduction. Quietness starts at 100 and loses points for traffic (up to 15), crowds (up to 25), difficult parking (up to 15) and weather (up to 10), each in just five steps. This is then multiplied by popularity: the most-visited place in an area keeps its full score, an average place gets about 70%, and a place only locals know about gets about 50%. That means a place almost nobody visits will never reach "Great" (75 points), however empty it is. Distance costs nothing up to 20 minutes, rising to 20 points at 2.5 hours. Rankings are always sorted by score.
• No-car mode: when you're going without a car, travel time is calculated using whichever is faster, walking or public transport, and road traffic and parking are taken out of the score.
• Explore more: there are also places to visit by region, features on quieter trips for weekends and holidays, this weekend's festivals and New Year sunrise spots (Korean).
• On a place's detail page: "Save to calendar" downloads an event file (.ics) to your device. Turn on "Notify me on quiet days" and, whenever one of the weekends or public holidays in the next two weeks looks quiet for that place, we'll let you know in the morning (up to 5 places per device). If you visited a place today, you can tap "I went today" to tell us how crowded it really was, and once enough responses come in, we show how accurate our forecasts have been.
• Major places in Seoul (Gyeongbokgung Palace, the Hangang Parks, etc.): when you view today's date, we also show the "live right now" crowd level from the Seoul Metropolitan Government's real-time city data. This is the only real-time information; all other scores, crowd levels and parking figures are forecasts.

Good to know

• The Noonchi Score is an estimate for reference only, based on public data and forecasts. Actual road and on-site conditions may differ.
• Exhibition centers, convention centers and performance venues are only worth visiting when something is on, so they get a low score and are marked "Only during events".
• Islands with no bridge to the mainland, such as Jeju Island and Ulleungdo Island, are calculated separately from the mainland. We don't recommend places on a different landmass from your starting point.
• Descriptions and most photos come from the Korea Tourism Organization (under the Korea Open Government License, KOGL). Where KTO has no photo, we use freely licensed photos from Wikimedia Commons (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, etc.), with the author and license shown for each photo.
• There's no sign-up. Your chosen starting point, recent location and device location corrections, favorites, places you've added, places with notifications on, and settings such as score preferences, sort order, No-car mode and display theme are stored only in this browser (localStorage). Address and place search, neighborhood names and map images are fetched by your browser directly from VWorld, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's mapping service. For details, see our Privacy policy (Korean).

Data sources

Korea Tourism Organization: Korean-language tourism information, attraction concentration rates, related attractions and tourism photo gallery (KOGL); public pages republishing KTO tourism information, plus official websites and local government notices (for checking opening hours and parking); Wikimedia Commons (photos); Korea Meteorological Administration short-term forecasts; Korea Expressway Corporation traffic forecasts; national car park information from the Public Data Portal (data.go.kr); Seoul Open Data Plaza public car park information; Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport VWorld (address and place search, neighborhood names); OpenStreetMap (maps, and address search when VWorld finds no match); Korea Exhibition Industry Foundation domestic exhibition schedules (exhibitions by venue); Seoul Metropolitan Government real-time city data (live crowd levels at major Seoul places); Korea Forest Service and National Recreational Forest Office autumn foliage forecasts (peak foliage dates).