Originally Posted by
VT_hawkeye
YMMV, but I found this not to be relevant or necessarily true. Citibank non-"Global ATM"s in Seoul did not accept my Visa ATM card from a major regional US bank, and convenience store ATMs were highly inconsistent -- just within the neighborhood I stayed in, Lotte Bank at 7-Eleven and Standard Chartered at a C/U worked, but Standard Chartered at the GS25 around the corner did not.
The best bet is a bank location with physical "Global ATM" signage. Anything else, even if it has "English" and "Foreign Card" menu selections, appears to vary by rules opaque to the average consumer.
Thanks all for the tips. I ended up finding a couple ATMs to withdraw from at Incheon and Gimpo. At Incheon I used my Fidelity Gold card to do a cash advance and got a rate of 400,000 won for $393, which doesn't seem to be very good (I think this was a KEB Global ATM, if I recall). Fidelity says they waive any additional transaction fees besides a 1% FTF - I'm assuming the $6 trans fee was included in the withdrawal. I then withdrew $200 more at Gimpo from Shinhan with my Andrews FCU Globetrek Visa the same morning and got a much better rate of 200,000 won for $193 USD.
These two times were the *only* times I withdrew any money from an ATM on the entire trip because my father in-law ended up bringing a crazy amount of USD, changed a lot of it at the foreign exchange places at Incheon, and insisted on paying for everything. Had I known all this beforehand, I wouldn't have bothered withdrawing anything! Gah!
Aside from that, I found that most places outside of Seoul and in Jeju and Busan, accept credit card. One place we ate at in Jeju accepted Discover even! Otherwise, anytime I needed to charge something though, I'd use the Capital One Venture and it worked out just fine.