Korea Travel Hotline 1330: The One Number to Save
The taxi driver doesn’t understand where you want to go. The pharmacy doesn’t understand what hurts. The guesthouse owner is saying something important and you have no idea what it is.
You could open a translation app and hold it up. Or you could dial 1330 and hand the phone over.
What 1330 is
1330 is Korea’s official travel helpline, run by the Korea Tourism Organization. Dial it from any phone in Korea with no area code. From outside Korea it’s +82-2-1330.
It runs 365 days a year, 7 a.m. to midnight, and it is not a recording.
Most visitors save 112 and 119 before they arrive — police and ambulance — and stop there. Those are the right numbers for an emergency. But the situations that actually derail a trip are usually not emergencies. They’re the ones where nobody speaks your language and nothing is on fire.
That’s the gap 1330 fills.
The part that matters: it interprets, live
This is the feature people don’t know exists, and it changes what the number is for.
1330 doesn’t only tell you things. It will interpret between you and the Korean person in front of you, on the same call. Korea’s own government service listing describes it as 3자통역 — three-way interpretation — and lists the settings plainly: accommodation, public transport, restaurants, shops.
So the move is:
- You call 1330 and explain the problem in your language
- You hand your phone to the driver, the pharmacist, the landlord
- They explain their side in Korean
- The phone comes back to you in your language
It costs you a normal local call, and it works right up to midnight.
What else it does
The official service listing gives 1330 four jobs:
| Service | What it means |
|---|---|
| 전국 관광 안내 | Travel information for anywhere in Korea |
| 관광통역 | Live interpretation — the one above |
| 관광 불편신고 상담 | Tourist complaint intake |
| 관광경찰 연결 창구 | A route to the tourist police |
It also helps with lost property — taking the report and pointing you at whichever office actually holds it, which is not obvious when you don’t know whether it’s the venue, the transport operator or the police who has your bag.
That last row is worth reading twice. If something has gone wrong — you think you were overcharged, a shop won’t honour something, someone is behaving badly toward you — 1330 is a door to the tourist police without you having to work out which station or how to explain it.
Complaints can also be filed directly at touristcomplaint.or.kr.
Eight languages
1330 answers in eight languages:
Korean · English · Japanese · Chinese · Russian · Vietnamese · Thai · Indonesian
That list is the whole argument for saving the number. It is not an English-only service with a translation layer bolted on — it is staffed in the languages most visitors to Korea actually arrive speaking.
The line runs every day of the year, 7 a.m. to midnight. That is generous — it covers the entire span in which a normal travel problem happens — but it is not 24 hours, and plenty of pages online still say it is.
After midnight, 1330 is not your number. That is what 112 and 119 are for, and both of those do run around the clock.
And if your language isn’t among the eight, English is — and 1330 deals with second-language English callers all day.
You don’t have to phone
1330 is not only a phone number, which matters if you’re somewhere loud, somewhere you can’t speak, or on a data-only SIM.
- Text message — SMS 1330 directly
- KakaoTalk, LINE, Facebook and WeChat — whichever messenger you already use
- 1330 Messenger — browser chat, no app install
- The Visit Korea app — its travel consultation menu drops you into the same text service
- Online voice call — free over Wi-Fi through the app, so a phone with no Korean SIM still reaches it
That last one is the quiet solution to a real problem: the traveller who has landed, has no local number, and is standing in an airport with only airport Wi-Fi.
When to call 1330 — and when not to
Be clear about this, because getting it wrong costs time you may not have.
| Situation | Call |
|---|---|
| Someone is hurt, or you aren’t sure | 119 |
| Crime, a threat, a traffic accident with a dispute | 112 |
| Lost, stuck, overcharged, can’t communicate, need to explain something to a Korean speaker | 1330 |
A real emergency goes to 119 or 112 first. Both of those lines can bring an interpreter into the call themselves — we went through how 112 and 119 work in English, including the fact that both accept text messages.
1330 does connect onward. Korea’s official government portal lists the agencies it will hand you to when the situation calls for it — the Fire Agency (119), the Immigration Contact Center (1345), and the tourism complaint centre — covering immigration, safety accidents, medical situations, policing and tourist trouble.
That is genuinely useful, and it is still not a reason to call 1330 first in an emergency. A connection costs time an ambulance doesn’t have. Dial 119. Let 1330 handle everything that isn’t bleeding.
Where 1330 wins is everything below that line — which is most of what actually happens.
Details above are from the Korea Tourism Organization and Korea’s government service listings. Last verified: 2026-08-19.
Save it now
Two minutes, once:
- Save 1330 as a contact, and +82-2-1330 as a second entry for when you’re not on a Korean network
- Add the 1330 chat on KakaoTalk or LINE before you need it
- Keep it next to 112 and 119, not instead of them
The Korean part
1330 is genuinely good, and it is free, and we would rather you used it than us for the things it covers. Directions, opening hours, working out what a sign says, getting a driver to understand a destination — that’s their job, and they do it in eight languages every day of the year.
Where we’re different is that 1330 hands the call back and hangs up. It won’t ring a plumber for you, negotiate a price, wait in for a technician, or handle the paperwork afterwards. When the problem needs someone to do something in Korean rather than translate a sentence, send it to us.
Use both. 1330 for the sentence you can’t say. Us for the thing that still has to get done.