Why I Built a K-pop Concert Travel Guide for Every Tour City

I like K-pop. A lot.

BTS in particular. My first real exposure was through American talk shows — Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Late Late Show with James Corden. I watched BTS on all of them, and I was hooked. But the one that really got me was the Crosswalk Concert on James Corden's show — BTS performing right there, on the street, in front of cars. A global superstar group, close enough to touch. I'd never seen anything like it. Had any show ever done something this bold?

They were singing live, dancing hard, and it sounded like a studio recording. I couldn't believe it. How is that even possible? That was the thought I kept coming back to. After that, I started watching every BTS performance video I could find on YouTube. And all of it led to one thought:

But the moment "let's go to a concert" became real, the problem wasn't the ticket. The ticket was just the beginning. The real work started after that.

Think about it — even when your company sends you on a business trip, someone has to research flights, hotels, restaurants, transportation, and put together an itinerary. If there's a conference abroad, you look into Airbnb or hotel stays for several days, maybe rent a car. And most companies have a team that handles this for you. You file a request, and someone takes care of the logistics. Expenses go on the corporate card.

But a K-pop concert? You're completely on your own.

Where is the venue? How do you get there from the airport? Are there decent hotels nearby? How do you get back to your hotel at night after the show ends? I had to search for every single piece of this, one by one. Every city was different. Every country had a different transit system. Whether you could catch the last train depended on what time the encore ended.

So I started thinking — isn't there a way to solve all of this in one place?

I looked at trip.com and agoda.com, but they didn't cut it. You could book flights and hotels, sure, but the information was too fragmented. "How do I get from this city to this venue?" — no answer. "Can I get a taxi at 11 PM after the show?" — no answer either.

And when it came to artist-specific information — tour schedules, which cities they were performing in — the coverage was even worse. I visited official sites, joined fan communities, but the information I found always needed to be processed by me. Check dates on one site, look up the venue location on Google Maps, search for hotels on another site, find transportation tips from some Reddit thread. At some point, I caught myself with ten tabs open, organizing everything into a spreadsheet.

That's when it hit me. I can't be the only one dealing with this. Fans from Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the US — anyone trying to attend a concert abroad must be going through the same thing. Some of them are doing this for the first time and don't even know what to prepare. Some are nervous about traveling alone.

So I built KPopGo — one site with all the information in one place.

kpopgo.art

I started with just a few BTS tour cities. I pulled information from official sites, cross-referenced Reddit, dug through fan communities, checked wikis. It was honestly exhausting. But as I added cities one by one, patterns started to emerge. Airport-to-venue transit, late-night return routes after the show, hotels near the venue — every city was different, but the structure of what fans needed to know was the same. I built up know-how. The speed picked up. After BTS came TWICE, then SEVENTEEN, then aespa... one by one, until I was covering 14 artists across 240+ cities.