We wanted to try withdrawing money from an ATM machine in Seoul and see what the exchange rate would have been, just for comparison, but we never got around to it. 🙁 Too bad because withdrawing money from the ATM turned out to give me the best exchange rate during my Bali trip and it would have been nice to see if it was the same for Korea. A mission for next time, then?
Another thing that some people do is buy foreign currency at a Philippine bank, whether it’s the actual currency of the place they’re going to, or US dollars which they intend to exchange at their country of destination. If the latter, 10,000 PHP would have bought roughly 196 USD at BPI, which would then have bought 223,636 KRW at Incheon Airport — better than any of the methods described above. If you’re going to the bank anyway, you should definitely give this a shot, especially if you’re exchanging a huge amount of money where the difference between what you get at the bank and at the airport would be quite significant. The days leading up to our trip were so busy that I didn’t even think of allotting precious time for a trip to the bank…but perhaps I should have.
I’ve also been told that money changers at Myeongdong give better exchange rates than others. I didn’t see money changers while I was walking around there but maybe I just didn’t look hard enough or it was just because I wasn’t really looking out for them. What I don’t like about this is having to spend the time to look for a money changer — and then if you realize that the money changer at the airport gave better rates, you won’t be able to go back. 😀 But this is actually worth a try in the future.