The Booking System Wasn’t Built for You

We hear the same story from guests over and over. Someone stares at a ticket page for the KTX, Korea’s high-speed rail line, retypes their name a few different ways, and assumes the problem is them. It isn’t. Korail, the national rail operator that runs the KTX, decided how a name should look long before they ever opened the page, and a foreign passport was never part of the plan.Buy a train ticket as a visitor and you’ll hit one of three walls. The site won’t take your name the way it’s printed on your passport. Your card gets rejected with an error message that explains nothing. Or the whole process just breaks halfway through, and you’re standing at the station with less time than you had before you started.Baseball is worse, just differently. Each team in the KBO, Korea’s professional baseball league, runs its own ticketing site, on its own schedule, and some of them ask for a Korean resident registration number before they’ll sell you a seat. Others don’t take foreign cards at all. Plenty of visitors just show up at the stadium and buy at the box office, which usually works, right up until the game everyone wanted to see sells out before the gates open.It Was Never About the L...