Most of a trip needs no plan for the worst day. This page is the plan, and it is short: three phone numbers, one of which almost no visitor knows exists.
The two you can guess
119 is fire, rescue and ambulance — and disasters generally, including gas leaks and electrical accidents. 112 is the police: crime, assault, theft, a missing person.
The useful part is what happens if you pick wrong. The two services run an integrated system that shares reports in real time, so a call to one is forwarded to the other without you repeating yourself. In an emergency, do not spend a second deciding which number is correct. Dial either.
For 119 specifically: operators are available in Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese, and your location is traced automatically once the call connects. If you are somewhere you cannot name — a hiking trail, an alley off a street whose sign you cannot read — that single fact is why calling beats trying to describe where you are.
The one you don’t know: 1330
1330 is the Korea Tourism Organization’s hotline, and it is the most underappreciated number in Korean travel. It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and it does two things that matter.
It interprets, not merely informs. You can call 1330 and have them speak to a taxi driver, a hotel desk, a hospital receptionist or a police officer on your behalf.
And it routes. The service coordinates with immigration, the fire authorities and the tourism complaint centre, covering safety accidents, medical problems, legal trouble and ordinary travel disputes. In July 2026 it handled 15,167 enquiries, and medical questions were the single largest category among its main topics.
Languages: Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese and Russian around the clock, with Vietnamese, Thai and Malay/Indonesian on shorter hours, roughly 08:00 to 19:00.
Save it before you need it. If something has gone wrong and it is not an ambulance question, 1330 is the correct first call.
Hospitals, and what they cost you
Korea’s health system is good and fast. The part that surprises visitors is the bill: national health insurance does not cover short-term visitors, so you pay the hospital directly and claim on your travel insurance afterwards.
Two practical consequences. Bring travel insurance — an emergency room visit you pay for yourself is survivable, an inpatient stay is not the sort of thing to fund out of a holiday budget. And collect the paperwork before you leave the building: ask at the desk for an itemised receipt and the medical record, in English if they have it. Korean hospitals will produce this if asked, and insurers ask for exactly these documents.
For a question that is not urgent enough for 119, 1339 is a separate medical information line.
Pharmacies, including at 1 a.m.
Everyday medicine comes from a 약국 (yakguk, pharmacy), marked with that sign and usually clustered near clinics and subway exits. Most keep ordinary shop hours, which is a problem at midnight.
The answer is the 공공심야약국 (gonggong simya yakguk, public night pharmacy) system. Seoul runs 39 of them across its 25 districts, generally open 22:00 to 01:00; 28 open every day of the year and the rest on designated days. Korea also runs an emergency medical information service, E-Gen, that lists which hospitals and pharmacies are open right now — though at midnight in an unfamiliar city, calling 1330 and asking them to find the nearest open one is faster than searching.
Things worth doing before anything goes wrong
Put 1330 in your phone now. Take a photo of your passport’s photo page and keep it somewhere that is not your passport. Know the name of the neighbourhood you are staying in, in Korean characters, on your phone — a screenshot is enough, and it turns a taxi problem into a non-problem.
And keep the everyday guides to hand: the card guide if payment is the problem rather than safety, and Naver Map for the address of wherever you need to reach.
Emergency-number roles and the 112–119 integration are from Korean government sources; 119 language support and automatic location tracing from the fire service; 1330’s hours, languages and July 2026 enquiry volume from the tourism hotline and Korean press; the Seoul public night pharmacy figures from Seoul city. Checked 8 September 2026. Hours and coverage change — in the moment, calling is more reliable than any page, including this one.
