The Shilla Seoul Review: Executive Lounge, Rooms and a Mixed Luxury Stay
StayArchive Rating: 8.5/10
The Shilla Seoul is one of those hotels whose reputation arrives before you do.
For many Korean travelers, it is more than another five-star hotel in Seoul. It is one of the country’s defining luxury hotels, known for its formal atmosphere, strong dining, excellent facilities and unmistakably grand public spaces.
I had visited several times for meals, weddings and bakery runs before finally staying for one night in December 2019. I booked an Executive Business Deluxe Double through Expedia for somewhere in the KRW 400,000 range, including access to the Executive Lounge.
The result was complicated.
The room was elegant and comfortable. The facilities were excellent. The Executive Lounge served some of the best food I had experienced in a Seoul hotel lounge, and I still consider The Shilla’s pastry operation a benchmark in the city.
The service, however, repeatedly felt less polished than I expected from a hotel with this reputation.
Nothing went spectacularly wrong. That was almost the problem. It was a collection of small lapses — an awkward check-in, some strangely rigid interactions, a housekeeping issue and breakfast service that did not run particularly smoothly.
Looking back, I would still give the stay 8.5/10. The tangible parts were simply too good to score much lower.
But I have never returned for another overnight stay.
That probably tells you more than the number does.
This review is based on my December 2019 stay. Where relevant, I have updated room, lounge and facility information to reflect the hotel’s current operations in 2026.
Quick Verdict: Is The Shilla Seoul Worth Staying At?
Yes, for the right traveler.
The Shilla Seoul is particularly appealing if you want to experience one of Korea’s best-known luxury hotels, care about dining and hotel facilities, and do not mind staying in a quieter part of central Seoul.
Its rooms are refined rather than fashionable, the indoor pool is pleasant, and food is one of the strongest reasons to choose the hotel.
My main reservation is service. During my 2019 stay, it was generally formal and polite but not consistently warm or effortless. For an ordinary upscale hotel, some of the issues would have been minor. At The Shilla, I expected better.
Best for: luxury-hotel enthusiasts, couples, food-focused travelers and guests planning to spend substantial time at the hotel.
Less ideal for: first-time Seoul visitors who prioritize shopping, nightlife and attractions immediately outside the hotel.
Location: Central Seoul, but Not a Neighborhood Hotel
The Shilla Seoul sits in Jangchung-dong, near Dongguk University and Namsan. The nearest subway station is Dongguk University Station on Line 3.
On a map, the hotel looks very central. In practice, I would describe it as more of a destination hotel than a neighborhood hotel.
There are pleasant places to walk nearby, including Jangchungdan Park and sections of the Seoul City Wall, and I wandered around Dongguk University during my stay. But the area is hilly, and you do not step outside into the density of restaurants, shops and nightlife found in Myeongdong, Hongdae or central Gangnam.
You largely come to Jangchung-dong because you want to be at The Shilla.
Unless, of course, your Seoul itinerary has an unusually strong emphasis on jokbal.
Executive Business Deluxe Room
My booking was for an Executive Business Deluxe Double, with no upgrade involved. It was a third-party Expedia reservation, so what I booked was essentially what I received.
The room category still exists today. The Shilla currently lists the Executive Business Deluxe at 43 square meters, with rooms on floors 7 through 22.
Mine was on the 20th floor and faced Yeong Bin Gwan, the hotel’s traditional Korean guest house.
Even in 2019, the room did not feel particularly new. But I do not mean that as much of a criticism.
The design was restrained and classic rather than aggressively contemporary, and the materials felt appropriately expensive. More importantly, the room was genuinely comfortable. I remember the bedding especially well, and the overall quality felt consistent with what I expected from a top luxury hotel.
The Yeong Bin Gwan view was also more appealing than a generic city view might have been.
The weather during my stay was grey and hazy, so I did not feel that I had lost much by not facing Namsan. And Yeong Bin Gwan is a fairly distinctive thing to wake up to.
Bathroom and Amenities
The bathroom was another strong point: spacious, solidly finished and appropriately luxurious.
During my stay, the toiletries were Molton Brown, which I liked enough to request another set before leaving.
The coffee and tea setup was less impressive. I remember finding it surprisingly basic for the category, particularly because there was no Nespresso machine in my room.
This was hardly a stay-ruining problem. But luxury hotels tend to be judged by small details precisely because the large things are already expected to be good.
The Executive Lounge: Excellent Food, Less Impressive Execution
The Executive Lounge was perhaps the most interesting part of the stay.
I checked in at the lounge on the 23rd floor. I remember the process feeling oddly improvised, with the check-in completed while I was standing rather than comfortably seated.
That may sound extremely minor. It is extremely minor.
But it became an early preview of the stay: nothing disastrous, just a persistent feeling that a hotel this prestigious should have been smoother.
The lounge itself was beautiful. The materials, lighting, furniture and views all felt properly luxurious.
Four Food Presentations Then, Three Now
This is one important difference between my 2019 stay and The Shilla Seoul today.
In 2019, Executive Lounge guests received four food presentations per day: breakfast, a lunchtime light snack, afternoon tea and happy hour.
It was unusually generous. With two people staying in the room, you could make a surprisingly serious attempt at eating your way through the entire day without leaving the lounge.
The current Executive Lounge offers three daily presentations: breakfast, afternoon tea and happy hour. The lunchtime light-snack service I experienced is no longer part of the standard schedule.
So the food shown in this review reflects my 2019 stay, not necessarily the exact selection you will find today.
Afternoon Tea
Afternoon tea was my first proper feeding session — and with four presentations a day, the lounge occasionally felt like a very elegant feeding program.
The standout was the scone with Devon clotted cream. The selection was not enormous, but the quality was good and it did what afternoon tea needed to do: prevented me from becoming hungry enough to behave irrationally before happy hour.
Happy Hour: The Best Part of the Lounge
Happy hour ran from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., a genuinely useful four-hour window. The long evening service remains one of the lounge’s more appealing features today.
And the food was excellent.
There were multiple hot dishes, cold items, desserts and a proper wine selection. I remember dishes such as chop steak and taco-style chicken, and the overall spread was easily substantial enough to replace dinner.
Some of the hot food was fairly salty — almost as if it had been specifically instructed to make me drink more wine — but flavor was not the problem.
The wine selection also looked appropriately serious, although asking me to identify individual bottles seven years later would require me to start inventing things.
I do remember drinking enough of it to conclude that I approved.
My stranger complaint concerned the non-alcoholic drinks.
There was no proper refrigerator stocked with the sort of soft drinks and sparkling water I had become accustomed to at Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas and other competing luxury hotel lounges. Even the bottled-water presentation felt unusually basic.
Does the absence of Perrier determine whether a hotel is luxurious? Obviously not.
But when the room rate, food and surroundings are all operating at the top end of the market, a surprisingly basic beverage setup becomes more noticeable than it would anywhere else.
The food itself, however, was difficult to criticize.
Executive Lounge Breakfast
Breakfast the following morning was perfectly adequate in terms of variety, particularly after I had spent the previous evening treating a four-hour happy hour as a personal challenge.
Again, the problem was execution rather than food.
Several items remained empty longer than I expected, and the chef responsible for the egg station was frequently away from the counter. Getting an omelet became strangely dependent on timing.
Calling it a bad breakfast would be unfair. The food itself was good.
But at a hotel positioned at this level, keeping the buffet replenished and the live station reliably staffed seemed like a reasonable expectation.
Indoor Pool and Other Facilities
I used the indoor swimming pool and liked it.
The current facility includes a 25-meter indoor pool beneath a glass structure, with natural light and views toward Namsan. It is not an enormous resort pool, but the setting makes it a genuinely pleasant place to swim.
Photography was not permitted when I visited, so this is the rare StayArchive pool section with no photographic evidence that I actually entered the water.
The hotel also operates Urban Island, its separate outdoor pool complex. I visited in December, so it was irrelevant to my stay. Summer travelers should check their specific rate or package rather than assuming outdoor-pool access is automatically included.
I also had sauna access, although seven years later my memory of it is too vague to offer a meaningful review.
Sometimes forgetting is more responsible than inventing adjectives.
Service: Where My Stay Lost Points
Service is the hardest part of this review because I do not think the staff were universally rude or incompetent.
The overall impression was subtler than that.
Interactions were generally formal and polite, but I rarely felt particularly welcomed. Around the fitness facilities, several exchanges felt more focused on telling me what I could not do or where I could not go than on making the experience easy.
At times, the hotel felt more controlling than welcoming.
Then came the housekeeping issue.
When I returned to the room and prepared to use the bathtub, I found a hair that was very clearly not mine.
I seem to possess a completely useless talent for discovering these things in hotel rooms.
I contacted the hotel, and a manager came to the room, apologized politely and later sent cookies.
I thought the recovery itself was appropriate.
The problem was the accumulation: the awkward check-in, several rigid interactions, small lounge-service lapses and then a cleanliness issue, all during one short stay.
At a less prestigious hotel, I might have shrugged.
At The Shilla Seoul, I kept thinking: shouldn’t this be better?
That is where most of the missing points went.
A different version of that same tension between excellent hardware and frustrating service appeared in my Josun Palace Seoul review.
Food Is Why I Kept Coming Back
There is an important postscript to all this.
I never booked another stay at The Shilla after 2019.
But I kept coming back to eat.
Over the years, I continued visiting The Parkview, The Library and Pastry Boutique. That probably says more about my opinion of The Shilla’s food than another enthusiastic paragraph could.
Personally, I still consider Pastry Boutique the benchmark for hotel cakes and pastries in Seoul.
I have eaten very good cakes at many luxury hotels here.
I still think Shilla wins.
Is The Shilla Seoul Good Value?
My Executive Business Deluxe stay cost somewhere in the KRW 400,000 range in 2019.
That was not cheap at the time, but it was not absurd either. Two guests had lounge food available throughout much of the day, including a happy hour substantial enough to serve as dinner, plus breakfast, pool access and a very good room.
At today’s Seoul luxury-hotel prices, I would consider a similar Executive Lounge package in the KRW 400,000 range extremely attractive.
The catch is that the lounge now offers three food presentations rather than the four I received in 2019, so travelers should compare the Executive-room premium against how much they actually value breakfast, afternoon tea and happy hour.
For me, the bigger question would not be whether The Shilla can cook.
I am quite confident about that.
It would be whether the service experience now matches everything else.
Who Should Stay at The Shilla Seoul?
I would recommend The Shilla Seoul most strongly to international visitors who want to experience one of Korea’s signature luxury hotels, rather than simply booking another global chain.
It also makes sense for travelers who consider hotel dining an important part of the trip. The relatively self-contained location encourages you to spend time on the property, and fortunately The Shilla gives you plenty of reasons to do exactly that.
I would be less enthusiastic for travelers whose priority is exploring Seoul on foot from the moment they leave the lobby. Jangchung-dong is calm and reasonably central, but it is not a particularly lively hotel neighborhood.
For a broader comparison with Seoul’s established luxury hotels, see my guide to four classic luxury hotels in Seoul, covering The Shilla Seoul, Lotte Hotel Seoul, The Westin Josun Seoul and Grand Walkerhill Seoul.
Final Verdict: 8.5/10
The Shilla Seoul is an unusual hotel for me to review because 8.5/10 sounds more enthusiastic than my memory of the stay feels.
The room was excellent. The bedding was comfortable. The bathroom was luxurious. The indoor pool was pleasant. The lounge food was among the strongest I had experienced in Seoul, and the wider F&B operation remains something I actively enjoy years later.
Those are substantial strengths.
But service is part of a luxury hotel too, and during my 2019 stay it repeatedly fell short of what I expected from The Shilla name.
For a hotel this good at almost everything tangible, I expected it to be better at the intangible part.
I have not returned for another overnight stay since.
I have, however, returned many times for cake.
Perhaps that is the most accurate review I can give.
The Shilla Seoul FAQ
Is The Shilla Seoul worth staying at?
Yes, particularly for travelers who value luxury-hotel dining, good facilities and the experience of staying at one of Korea’s best-known hotels. My own 2019 stay was mixed because of service issues, but the room, facilities and food were all strong.
What is the Executive Business Deluxe room size at The Shilla Seoul?
The Executive Business Deluxe is currently 43 square meters. My room felt spacious, comfortable and classically designed rather than especially modern.
What does The Shilla Seoul Executive Lounge include?
The Executive Lounge currently offers three daily food presentations: breakfast, afternoon tea and happy hour. During my 2019 stay, there was also a lunchtime light-snack service, making four presentations per day.
Does The Shilla Seoul have an indoor pool?
Yes. The hotel has a 25-meter indoor pool with natural light and views toward Namsan. Urban Island, the seasonal outdoor pool area, is operated separately, so guests should check whether access is included with their specific booking.
Is The Shilla Seoul in a good location for sightseeing?
The hotel is centrally located near Dongguk University Station, Namsan and Jangchungdan Park, but the immediate area is hilly and relatively quiet. It works better as a destination hotel than as a base for travelers who want shopping, restaurants and nightlife directly outside the door.
Related Seoul Hotel Reviews
- Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas Review — my stronger club-lounge experience, with calmer service and an excellent food-and-drink offering.
- Josun Palace Seoul Review — another luxury stay where excellent hardware and food were complicated by the service experience.
- Lotte Hotel Seoul Review — another major Korean luxury hotel, with a particularly strong paid lounge experience during my stays.
