About Dear Sonnim

Sonnim (손님) is the Korean word for guest.

Hi there 👋
No matter how many times you've been to Korea, there's always something nobody warned you about — the immigration line that left you anxious, the tax refund you missed because no one explained the steps, the place locals actually go that you can't find on Google.

That's exactly why Dear Sonnim exists.

We're a small team of two based in Seoul. We're both Korean, and we've been hearing the same questions from Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Malaysian travelers for a while now — the same snags, coming up again and again. So we started writing down what we'd tell a friend who's about to fly in. Not professional travel writers, not an official tourism board — just people who are actually here.

Dear Sonnim isn't another "top 10 things to do" list you've already seen on every site. It's the stuff people miss even after visiting Korea multiple times — written from what we've actually run into.

⚠️ To be upfront — we don't know everything. Immigration rules change, shops close without notice. What we write is what we know right now, not a 100% guarantee.

So why "Sonnim"?

In Korean, "손님" (sonnim) means guest, or customer. But not just "someone who showed up" — the word carries the honorific ending "-nim," the same respect you'd add to someone's title. Shops call their customers sonnim. Someone dropping by your home is sonnim too. We heard that, once, Koreans even called the things they feared sonnim, rather than name them directly. Hearing that, we realized how much weight this one word carries.

So we didn't want to just call you "Sonnim" — we wanted "Dear Sonnim." "Dear" is how you'd start a letter, right? To us, it felt like the word you use for someone you already know, written with care. That's what "Dear Sonnim" means, then: we may be meeting you for the first time, but we'll tell you things the way we would with someone we already know.

We want to have things ready for you before you even arrive — the way a friend in Seoul would. That's Dear Sonnim.

Save this before your next flight — more coming soon. 📌

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We currently write in Thai and Malay — pick yours below. More languages are on the way.