Travel in North Korea: guided tours through a border mostly closed since 2020

Who may visit and on what terms

Every tourist trip to North Korea is organised by a state travel bureau, among them the Korea International Travel Company and companies for sports, taekwondo and youth travel, and guided tours are compulsory. Visitors may not leave the designated areas without their Korean guides, and the guide decides where a group goes and obtains the permits needed to leave Pyongyang. As of 2024 visas were processed through licensed agents. A tourist visa usually takes the form of a separate blue tourist card, stamped by customs in place of the passport and taken back on departure.

In principle anyone may apply. In practice South Koreans and journalists are routinely refused, and South Koreans need permission from both governments, which is not granted for ordinary tourism. Since 1 September 2017 United States passports have been invalid for travel to, in or through the country without a special validation from the Secretary of State, under a ban renewed each year and still in force in October 2026. Even before the ban, holders of US passports had been refused tourist visas except during the Arirang mass games. The United States has no embassy in Pyongyang and Sweden acts for its citizens, and the United Kingdom has no embassy presence there either.

Visitors staying more than 24 hours must be registered with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which hotels normally arrange. Visitors are advised to call the country the DPRK and to avoid the name North Korea.

How the borders closed and partly reopened

North Korea closed its borders to foreign tourists on 22 January 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. By April 2021 the losses were estimated at no less than US$175 million. The UK Foreign Office advice current in October 2026 said that the borders remained closed to general entry, that some embassies had resumed work and that not all passenger routes had reopened.

The reopening has come in pieces:

How many visitors came before the closure

No official tourism statistics are published, and the counts that circulate are outside estimates. They do not agree:

Chinese visitors were the majority by every count. China designated North Korea a destination for organised outbound tours in September 2008 and an approved destination in 2010; tourist trains from Dandong began in April 2010, and self-drive tours for Chinese citizens in June 2011. Most Chinese visitors stayed less than a week and few returned. Through the Mount Kumgang zone in the southeast, almost two million South Koreans visited between 1998 and 2008, when a North Korean soldier shot a South Korean tourist who had strayed into a restricted area and the tours stopped. Kaesong was open to day trips from December 2007, at US$180 a day, until suspensions in 2008 and 2010.

What Pyongyang shows a visitor

The capital is the centre of every itinerary. Pyongyang lies on the Taedong about 109 kilometres upstream from the Yellow Sea, and the 2008 census counted 3,255,288 people there. It was rebuilt after the war to a master plan of 1953, with wide tree-lined boulevards and public buildings carrying mosaics, terraces and painted ceilings. The Juche Tower, a granite spire of 170 metres, holds 25,550 granite blocks, one for each day of Kim Il Sung's life when it was completed in 1982. The Mansu Hill complex includes the Korean Revolution Museum, and the Korea Central Zoo and the television tower are on the usual routes.

Newer buildings sit beside them: the Mansudae People's Theatre of 2012, the Munsu Water Park of 2013, and the residential streets of a 50,000-flat programme started in 2021, whose final stage broke ground in February 2025. The metro, trams and trolleybuses carry most commuters, cycle lanes were added in July 2015 and traffic jams had appeared by 2018. Okryu-gwan and Ch'ongryugwan are the best known restaurants, and mullet soup from the Taedong is the dish served to guests; a common greeting for someone back from Pyongyang asks how good the soup was.

Contact with residents is the thing visitors see least of. Unauthorised conversation with North Koreans was treated as spying in 2024, and local people risk punishment for using a foreigner's phone or watching foreign material. Defectors have argued that tourists see little of ordinary life and that the revenue supports the state; one put the positive effects at about 1% and the negative at 99%.

What a guided visit includes

The standard programme is built around Pyongyang and a few sites within reach of it. The 47-storey Yanggakdo International Hotel, built between 1986 and 1992 and opened in 1995, has about one thousand rooms and takes most foreign guests; the older Chongnyon Hotel was built for the World Festival of Youth and Students in 1989. The unfinished 105-storey Ryugyong Hotel is seen from outside. Outside the capital the common stops are Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone, where the armistice was signed, Kaesong and the port of Nampo. The road south to Panmunjom is the Reunification Highway, 168 kilometres long with 21 tunnels and 23 bridges, built with military labour. Within the zone the Joint Security Area is the one place where the two sides meet for talks. Nampo, about 50 kilometres southwest of Pyongyang, is the port through which aid arriving by sea has entered the country.

Kaesong is also where the culture article's World Heritage listing of Koryo monuments lies, and the Koguryo tombs are around Pyongyang. Mount Kumgang, closed to South Korean tours since 2008 and stripped of most South Korean-built facilities by 2024, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2025.

Where the border tours go

Some tours have gone beyond Pyongyang to the northeast, to the market at Rajin and to Chongjin. Other places are reached from the Chinese side: Namyang and the monasteries of Mount Chilbo from Tumen in Jilin, and, since 2021, a viewpoint at Changbai Millennium Cliff City looking across the river into Hyesan. In 2024 Chinese citizens could visit Tongrim County for up to two days on their identity cards. Two casinos operate for the Chinese market, one in Rason and one in the Yanggakdo hotel, while gambling is banned for North Koreans.

Which resorts were built for visitors

Since 2013 the state has built for tourism on a large scale. The Masikryong ski resort outside Wonsan opened in 2013 by one account and early 2014 by another, as the country opened to winter tourism from December 2013. The Yangdok hot spring resort followed in 2019, and the Rungra amusement park with a dolphinarium on an island in Pyongyang in 2012. The Wonsan-Kalma coastal area on the east coast, begun in 2018, opened to domestic tourists in July 2025, six years behind its planned date. In 2023 a law on revitalising tourism was adopted. Other programmes include the Pyongyang Marathon, open to foreign professionals since 2000 and to foreign amateurs since 2014, and since 2019 medical tourism.

The spending is large against the numbers. One estimate put investment in hotels and tourist amenities at US$7.8 billion by 2021, when a night at the Hyangsan Hotel cost US$1,500, close to 85% of an average North Korean's annual income. Tourism is one of the few sources of foreign currency left largely untouched by UN sanctions, and the strategy has been called a catch-22: the resorts can only pay for themselves if the restrictions on visitors and residents are loosened.

What visitors may carry and photograph

The rules at the border are strict and are set by the North Korean authorities. A foreign mobile phone can be brought in but must be registered, and it connects to no network inside the country. GPS devices are held by customs until departure. The UK Foreign Office advises against bringing books in Korean or anything religious, and customs confiscate material judged anti-government, subversive or pornographic; travel guides to North Korea, South Korea or Japan have been taken at the airport.

The won may not be taken in or out. Prices are listed in won but foreigners pay in foreign currency, most often euros, US dollars or Chinese yuan, and credit cards and international mobile payments are not accepted, so visitors carry cash.

Photographs need the guide's permission. Military sites, soldiers, scenes of poverty and construction sites are off limits, and a statue must be photographed whole. Two places have dress codes: the Mansudae Grand Monument and the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where trousers or knee-length skirts are required and sandals are forbidden. Jokes or insults about the leadership are taken very seriously. In 2016 an American student, Otto Warmbier, was sentenced to 15 years' hard labour for taking a propaganda poster from his hotel; he was released in a coma in June 2017 and died on 19 June that year. The UK Foreign Office records arrests of four US citizens and one Canadian, and a guard shot dead a South Korean tourist in 2008 who had strayed into a restricted military area.

How visitors reach Pyongyang and move around

Most arrive by air from Beijing, on Air Koryo or Air China, at Sunan airport northwest of the city; flights have also run from Shenyang, Vladivostok and Moscow, and trains from Beijing and Dandong. The UK Air Safety List bars Air Koryo from commercial services to the United Kingdom except with two Tupolev Tu-204 aircraft, and the UK Foreign Office cites incidents on its flights in July 2016 and May 2017.

Inside the country foreigners may not use public transport without a guide, taxis are reluctant to take them alone, and international driving permits are not valid. Roads outside the expressways are poor; in 2018 a bus carrying Chinese tourists crashed on the road from Pyongyang to the demilitarised zone. Military checkpoints with identity checks stand at the entrance to every town. The railways are the main transport network, and because of the mountains there is a single east-west line, from Pyongyang to Wonsan.

The clocks have moved twice in a decade. North Korea switched to its own Pyongyang Time of UTC+8:30 on 15 August 2015, and moved back to UTC+9, the same as South Korea, at 23:30 on 4 May 2018. The time page has the present zone and the hours of daylight.

When the seasons suit a visit

The weather described in the geography article sets the calendar. Spring and autumn are the transitional seasons, with mild temperatures and variable winds. Summer is hot and humid, and the UK Foreign Office warns that flooding is common in the rainy season of July and August and can disrupt travel. Winters are long and cold, with Pyongyang averaging lows of minus 13 °C in January, which is the season the Masikryong ski resort was built for. The public holidays around the leaders' birthdays, 16 February and 15 April, have been the occasions for the mass games, and the holidays page lists them.