Originally Posted by
hungarianhc
My wife and I, US citizens, are going to be traveling from HKG to ICN to HNL. We haven't booked ICN-HNL, hoping some award availability opens up. From the searches I've found, it doesn't appear that it will be a problem to enter Korea without a return ticket in hand, from an immigration perspective. Can anyone confirm? Thanks!
Have you looked at TIMATIC? The South Korean consulates (in the USA) websites?
If you can easily buy a refundable ticket of some sort, such as award tickets that can be cancelled without penalty as a UA 1K, I would do that to avoid problems.
Even if the rules don't say that you must have a return ticket or at least a ticket out of Korea, an immigration officer could find this suspicious and believe that you are likely to overstay. Or there could be a high threshold for the requirement on proving that you have sufficient funds (which most countries have on the books, although I don't know about Korea specifically).
More importantly, airline agents might not follow the rules. They could deny boarding even though Korea permits one way tickets.