Pyeongchang Trout Festival: What to Book Online, Hours, Dates
Last Updated on October 23, 2026
Quick Answer
Of everything at the Pyeongchang Trout Festival (평창송어축제), only tent fishing can be booked online, and the booking closes two days before your date. Everything else is bought at the ticket office, which stops selling at 16:00 although the grounds stay open until 17:00. The 2026 edition (the 17th) ran 9 January to 9 February after opening eight days late. The 2027 dates have not been announced.
The Full Answer
The Pyeongchang Trout Festival (평창송어축제) is a winter fishing festival on a frozen river at Jinbu (진부) in Gangwon Province, roughly 2 km in a straight line from Jinbu (Odaesan) station on the KTX line from Seoul. The main activity is ice fishing for trout through holes in the ice, but the site also has fishing tents, an indoor fishing pool, a bare-hand trout-catching pen, and a play area with sledding and ice carts.
Three questions decide whether a trip works, and the English-language pages checked for this article mostly leave them out: what can be booked in advance, what time the day actually ends, and when next winter’s dates will be known.
Everything below is the 2026 edition, the 17th festival. The committee’s site has no 2027 (18th edition) notice. Do not assume 2027 works the same way: use this page to know which questions to ask when the dates come out.
I read the festival’s own site, festival700.or.kr, in Korean on 22 October 2026: the home page, the price table, the FAQ, each activity page, the notice board, the sign-up form and the transport page. I also compared the home page against two archived copies from December 2025 and January 2026, and opened eight English-language pages about the festival.
What You Can Book Online, and What You Cannot
The festival’s home page says online reservation is for tent fishing only, and everything else is bought at the ticket office on the day. That is the rule, with one softener: the tent-fishing page says the tents are online-only but that tickets may be issued at the site if seats remain. So “online only” is not absolute, but do not plan a weekend around leftover tents.
The tent zone and the ordinary fishing zone are separate areas, and the official pages say you cannot move between them. A tent ticket does not get you onto the open-air ice, and an open-air ticket does not get you into a tent. If your group is split across the two, you will be in different places for the fishing part.
The ordinary zone (일반 낚시터) is described as holding about 2,000 people and sells only at the ticket office. The indoor pool holds 30 and the bare-hand pen runs sessions of 30, first come, first served, which may not run if ten or fewer people sign up. Some of these activity pages still carry a “2025” year label (more on that below), so treat the capacity figures as approximate.
Local tip — Tent fishing is the only product with an online booking, and the booking window is short. Reservations must be made at least two days before your date, and a reservation is confirmed only once payment is received. Changes and cancellations are free until 16:00 two days before the date; after that there is no refund, except where the festival itself cancels for site conditions or a natural disaster, in which case the refund is full. None of the eight English pages checked for this article mentioned the two-day cutoff or the refund rule. The one that mentioned online booking at all is a 2025 article.
Because the cutoff is two days, you cannot book a tent the evening before, and the cancellation deadline passes before the forecast firms up.
What the tickets cover
Prices are the official 2026 price table (the table itself has no year label; the FAQ on the same site refers to the 2026 school-entry year, so it is treated here as the 2026 edition):
| Ticket | Adult | Elementary school |
|---|---|---|
| Ice fishing (open-air zone) | ₩25,000 | ₩20,000 |
| Ice fishing plus play-area pass | ₩43,000 | ₩35,000 |
| Tent fishing | ₩39,000 | ₩30,000 |
| Tent fishing plus play-area pass | ₩49,000 | ₩43,000 |
| Indoor fishing | ₩20,000 | |
| Play-area pass only | ₩30,000 |
There is no separate junior-high or senior price: the table splits only elementary school from everyone else. Children below elementary-school age, including those due to start in 2026, are free when with a guardian. Companions who do not fish also need a ticket to enter either zone.
Two items on the table are easy to misread:
- The fishing rod is not included in the tent or ice-fishing tickets. The site sells rods for roughly ₩3,000 to ₩20,000 (as of 2026), but the FAQ says they are the line-and-lure kind (견지낚시 with artificial bait), and you may bring your own. Only the indoor pool lends a rod free.
- Tent tickets include the tent and chair; open-air ice tickets list the chair as extra. The note on the open-air ticket says rod and chair are bought separately.
If you want to cook or eat what you catch, the FAQ gives a handling fee of ₩4,000 per fish (as of 2026) for grilling or raw-fish preparation. Tent and ice tickets let you take out two fish per person; the indoor pool and bare-hand pen guarantee one.
Several English and Korean pages state prices that do not match this table: one English page gives entry at ₩10,000 to ₩15,000 with equipment included, another ₩15,000 for open-air ice fishing, and a Korean blog from February 2026 says entry is free. Some are earlier seasons or tour prices. Use the official table, and check the year it was published for.
The Day Ends Earlier Than the Hours Say
The FAQ gives operating hours of 09:00 to 17:00, and then adds a line that shapes the whole day: ticket sales at the main ticket office close at 16:00. None of the eight English pages checked for this article mentioned the 16:00 cutoff.
On the final day, the home page says the festival runs only until 14:00. In 2026 that was Monday, 9 February.
The bare-hand catching sessions have their own timetable on the activity page: 11:00 and 14:00 on weekdays, and 11:00, 13:00 and 15:00 on weekends, subject to site conditions. That page also carries a “2025” label on its dates, so whether the times held in 2026 is unconfirmed.
Local tip — Ticket sales close at 16:00, an hour before the grounds do, and on the last day everything ends at 14:00. A late-afternoon arrival buys you nothing, and if your trip falls on the final day you have a morning, not a day.
By KTX the cutoff is rarely a problem: an unofficial timetable (ordinary late-October weekdays, not the winter schedule) shows a Seoul Station departure at 08:57 reaching Jinbu at 10:38. The cutoff catches people who start late on their own. One Seoul day-tour listing gives arrival at 12:30 and departure at 16:00, so that tour leaves before the office closes.
2026 Opened Eight Days Late, and 2027 Dates Are Not Out
This is the part most guides skip. The 2026 festival was meant to open on 1 January and instead opened on 9 January.
I checked the festival home page through the Internet Archive. A copy saved on 15 December 2025 reads “2026.01.01 (Thu) ~ 02.02 (Mon)” with “online reservation: from December 15th”. A copy saved on 25 January 2026 reads “2026.01.09 (Fri) ~ 02.09 (Mon)”. So the official home page changed its dates between those two copies. The change date cannot be narrowed further: no archived copy exists in between.
The reason, according to news reports rather than the festival’s own notices, was warm weather. A report dated 23 December 2025 from Joongang Economy News (중앙이코노미뉴스) says the organizing committee postponed the opening to 9 January because the ice had not reached 20 cm, the safety thickness for ice fishing, and quotes a committee official saying this was the first time the opening itself had been postponed, though one- or two-day disruptions had happened over the previous four or five years. Reports from 6 and 7 January 2026 repeat the delay.
The official notice board today shows four notices, dated from November 2025 to January 2026: a gift-voucher notice, security contractor recruitment, the contractor result, and an ice-fishing contest. There is no notice about the postponement. One number is missing from the list (65); whether a notice was removed or not posted at all is unknown.
What that means for 2027
The opening date moves from year to year: the official past-festivals table gives 30 December 2022, 29 December 2023 and 3 January 2025, and the 2026 edition opened on 9 January. The 2026 online booking opened on 15 December, seventeen days before the planned opening.
The site today still shows the 2026 dates on its home page, and its newest notice is from January 2026. No 2027 dates are announced. But some pages already state them: one English travel site lists “January 9 – February 9, 2027 (Dates TBA)”, and tour listings are already selling days in January and February 2027. Those dates look like the 2026 dates carried forward, with no official source behind them.
Local tip — The 2027 festival (the 18th) has no announced dates, and 2026 started eight days late for a reason that cannot be forecast: ice thickness. If you must lock a flight or tour months ahead, choose a refundable option, and treat any page showing 2027 dates as a placeholder until the festival’s own home page changes. The site itself mixes year labels: the home and tent pages say 2026, while the ice-fishing and bare-hand pages still say “2025” next to the same dates.
Signing Up Needs a Korean Phone Number
To book a tent online, you must first create an account on the festival site. I read the sign-up form’s page code but did not create an account or submit the form, so what the server accepts is unconfirmed.
The form asks for an email as your ID, a password, your real name (the form says “must be your real name”), a birth date, a mobile number, an optional address and a required consent to booking text messages. In the mobile number field, the first part is a drop-down list with only 010, 011, 016, 017, 018 and 019, followed by two four-digit fields. There is no way to enter an international number with a country code. The form is in Korean only, although the page has a KO/EN toggle.
The home page has a single line in English for this situation: “If you are foreigner, please call us” at +82-33-336-4000, the same line that appeared in the December 2025 archived copy. The FAQ gives phone hours of 09:00 to 17:00. Whether the staff speak English is unconfirmed, and the one English article found that mentions the number is from January 2025.
Local tip — The tent-booking form only accepts Korean-style mobile numbers (010 to 019), so a visitor with a foreign SIM cannot complete it as written. Call +82-33-336-4000 between 09:00 and 17:00 Korean time, ahead of the two-day cutoff, and ask whether they can book it for you. Whether the staff handle English is unconfirmed; if you travel with a Korean-speaking friend, have them call. A data-only eSIM has no number to receive the booking text at all; our Korea eSIM and SIM guide covers which plans include a Korean phone number, though whether the festival form accepts one has not been tested.
Getting to Jinbu From Seoul
The festival address is 3562 Gyeonggang-ro, Jinbu-myeon, Pyeongchang-gun (평창군 진부면 경강로 3562). The festival’s transport page gives KTX times to Jinbu (Odaesan) station of about 1 hour 40 minutes from Seoul Station, 1 hour 20 minutes from Cheongnyangni and 1 hour 10 minutes from Sangbong. For booking trains, see our KTX booking guide and the T-money card guide for the local part of the trip.
Two things the official page does not do. It does not say how to cover the last stretch from the station to the festival ground: the straight-line distance between the two is about 1.9 km (a calculation from coordinates, not a road distance), and the road distance and taxi time were not measured. The official shuttle board on the festival site had no posts on 22 October, and the transport page covers only car, KTX and intercity bus. It does list Jinbu bus terminal 033-335-6963, Jinbu taxi 033-335-1050 and Pyeongchang tourist information 033-330-2771.
By intercity bus, the page lists Dong Seoul terminal departures from 06:40 to 20:20 at intervals of 30 to 60 minutes, and Seoul South terminal from 07:40 to 17:40. Travel time and fare are not given. By car, the page says the festival is three minutes from the Jinbu toll gate on the Yeongdong Expressway.
Tours From Seoul: Check What “Included” Means
Several operators sell a day trip. The point to check is what the ticket includes, because the listings read for this article say opposite things:
- One GetYourGuide listing says festival admission and winter activities are included but that trout fishing, rods and chairs are not, and must be bought on site.
- A Trazy listing says the same: ice fishing ticket and winter activities in the festival packages, with rods and chairs not included.
- A different GetYourGuide listing (and a WAUG one) says admission, a fishing chair and ice fishing equipment are included.
- A Klook listing’s title says free fishing rods are provided; only its search snippet could be read.
A listing that says “admission” does not say whether that means the ice-fishing ticket or the play-area pass, and a listing that mentions a tent does not explain how it would be booked, since tents are sold through the festival’s own two-day reservation. Neither point could be resolved from the listings.
Two of the listings also set a minimum group size of eight (one cancels with a 3-day email and a full refund if it is not met).
If you would rather skip the transport, a Seoul day tour on GetYourGuide lists weekday departures from 11 January to 11 February 2027 with admission, a chair and ice-fishing equipment included and a minimum of eight people, although the festival itself has not announced its 2027 dates.
For other winter day trips from Seoul, see the Gapyeong tourist bus in winter, Nami Island as a day trip and ski resort shuttle booking.
Local tip — The same festival is sold with opposite inclusions. Before you pay, find the exact words for rod, chair and tent in the “included” list, and look at the cancellation rule for a festival that shifts its dates. The listings read for this article give 24 hours (one GetYourGuide product) or 3 days (the Trazy change window), while the festival’s own refund rule covers only tent reservations.
How It Differs From the Hwacheon Festival
Visitors often confuse this festival with the Hwacheon Sancheoneo (mountain trout) Festival (화천산천어축제), and one Klook listing bundles the two with other ice festivals. Only two points were checked, and Hwacheon’s official pages were not read. Dates: in 2026 Hwacheon ran 10 January to 1 February (23 days, per Korean news), against Pyeongchang’s 9 January to 9 February. Booking: per search summaries, Hwacheon mixes on-site tickets with phone and online reservation, where Pyeongchang puts only tent fishing online. If a tour offers both, ask which one you are booked on.
What You Need to Know
- Only tent fishing is bookable online, at least two days ahead, confirmed on payment, refundable until 16:00 two days before the date.
- Ticket sales stop at 16:00. The grounds close at 17:00, and the final day ends at 14:00.
- You cannot switch zones, and companions need a ticket. Only children below elementary-school age are free.
- Rods and chairs are extra on open-air tickets, and cooking a fish costs ₩4,000 each (as of 2026).
- No 2027 dates yet. 2026 opened on 9 January instead of 1 January because the ice was too thin; treat any 2027 date as unconfirmed.
Our year-end music festivals guide covers other events whose dates are set late in the year.
Practical Tips
- Decide tent or open-air first. The two zones are separate, and only the tent is bookable online, so the choice fixes how you book.
- Book a tent well before the two-day cutoff. Leave time for the phone call if the online form will not accept your number.
- Call if you hold a foreign number. +82-33-336-4000, 09:00 to 17:00 Korean time; English support is unconfirmed, so keep a Korean-speaking contact as a fallback.
- Plan to be at the ticket office well before 16:00. Allow extra time for the station-to-site stretch, which the festival does not document.
- Bring your own rod if you want one, and gloves and a hat. The site sells rods, and the play-area rules require gloves and a hat.
- Choose refundable travel until the festival publishes. Dates move; the 2026 opening slid by eight days.
- Have a plan for a thin-ice day. The official FAQ has no replacement programme if the ice is too thin, so ask the office before you travel.
For a warm place to end the day, see our jjimjilbang guide. If you are adding a mountain hut stay, our national park shelter reservation guide covers another booking system with a short window.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is the Pyeongchang Trout Festival in 2027?
Not announced. The 2026 edition (the 17th) ran 9 January to 9 February after being postponed from 1 January. The home page still shows the 2026 dates and the newest notice is from January 2026. Pages that show 2027 dates appear to be copying 2026.
How do I buy tickets for the Pyeongchang Trout Festival?
Tent fishing is booked online, at least two days ahead, and confirmed on payment. All other tickets (open-air ice fishing, indoor fishing, bare-hand catching, play area) are bought at the ticket office on the day. Tent tickets may be sold on site if seats remain.
What time does the Pyeongchang Trout Festival close?
The grounds are open 09:00 to 17:00, but ticket sales at the main ticket office end at 16:00. On the last day of 2026 (9 February) the festival closed at 14:00.
Where is the Pyeongchang Trout Festival?
At 3562 Gyeonggang-ro, Jinbu-myeon, Pyeongchang-gun, Gangwon Province, near Jinbu (Odaesan) KTX station, about 1 hour 40 minutes from Seoul Station. The straight-line distance from the station is about 1.9 km (calculated); the road distance is not published, and the festival’s shuttle board was empty on 22 October 2026.
Can a foreigner book the tent online?
The sign-up form accepts only Korean mobile prefixes (010 to 019), so a foreign number cannot be entered. The home page tells foreigners to call +82-33-336-4000. Whether staff speak English is unconfirmed.
How much is the Pyeongchang Trout Festival?
In the 2026 edition, open-air ice fishing was ₩25,000 for adults and ₩20,000 for elementary-school children, and tent fishing ₩39,000 and ₩30,000. Rods and chairs on the open-air ticket are extra. Prices for 2027 are unannounced.
Related Questions
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