Sending students to Korea? Their first 48 hours decide the semester
Your work usually ends at the boarding gate. Placement confirmed, visa issued, dorm assigned, pre-departure session delivered. Then a student lands at Incheon at 9pm, reaches an empty room with a bare mattress, and the semester begins with a problem nobody prepared them for. This page is about that gap — what actually happens inside it, and three ways your institution can close it without taking on cost, storage or staff work.
What actually goes wrong in the first 48 hours
It is not homesickness and it is not paperwork. It is a supply problem with a very specific shape.
- They cannot buy anything online. Korean shopping platforms require a domestic payment card and SMS verification on a Korean number. A newly arrived student has neither, and will not have them until the alien registration card (ARC) comes through — typically two to four weeks after arrival.
- They do not know what a fair price is. Without local price knowledge, a first shop costs roughly 30–50% more than it should. It happens quietly, on every single item, and students rarely realise it.
- The first purchase is a physical problem. A duvet, a pillow, a drying rack and a kettle do not fit in a taxi with two suitcases. Students end up making three separate trips in their first week, jet-lagged, usually in the evening.
- Dorm rules are invisible from abroad. Some dormitories provide bedding, some do not; some refuse parcels before check-in; some hold them at a front desk. Students only discover which after they have already bought the wrong thing.
The result lands back on your desk as the same handful of questions every intake, asked individually, in the week when your team has the least time.
What Comfy Landing does
We are an independent proxy-ordering service based in Seoul. A student picks what they need from a checklist of 117 items, tells us their arrival date and address, and we buy each item from the Korean retailer that actually sells it cheapest and have it delivered to their accommodation, timed to their check-in. Prices are all-in — no shipping fee, no hidden charges — and no Korean card, phone number, ARC or address is required to order. The site runs in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, German, French and Vietnamese.
We deliberately hold no inventory and operate no warehouse. That is what keeps us cheap, and it is also what makes partnering with us easy: there is nothing to store, nothing to unpack, and nothing your staff ever has to sign for.
Three ways to work with us
Pick whichever fits how your office already runs. They are listed from least effort to most.
Add a line to the pre-arrival email
You already send an arrival information pack. We give you one paragraph and one link to drop into it, in the language your students read. Students order themselves, pay themselves, and receive their own parcel. Your office never touches the transaction.
We can issue a discount code specific to your institution so your students get a better price than the public one, and so you can see how many actually used it.
A checklist matched to your accommodation
Tell us what your dormitory or partner housing already provides — bedding or not, kitchen access or not, laundry facilities, what the room comes with — and we build a list for your students that leaves out everything they would have bought twice.
This is the version that saves students the most money, and it takes one email from someone who knows the buildings.
Cohort delivery on move-in day
If your students arrive as a group on a known date — exchange intakes, summer and winter schools, faculty-led programmes, short-term language courses — we coordinate the deliveries so they land together, on the day the building actually accepts them.
We work to the dormitory's own rule rather than around it. If parcels can only arrive after check-in, that is what we schedule.
What it costs you
| Institution pays | Nothing. Students are our customers, not you. |
|---|---|
| Storage or handling | None. Parcels go from the retailer to the student's address. |
| Staff time | Option A: one paragraph, once. Option B: one email. Option C: a shared date and the building's parcel rule. |
| Exclusivity | Not required. Students are free to use anything else, or nothing. |
| Student data | We never ask you for student contact details. Students come to us themselves. |
We would rather say this plainly: we are a young and deliberately small operation, and we would rather run one intake well than announce partnerships we cannot service. If your numbers are large, tell us the size early and we will tell you honestly what we can and cannot cover.
Also relevant if you are an agency or language institute
Study-abroad agencies, language institutes and relocation providers work the same way as Option A or C. If you already assemble a welcome package for your participants, arrival essentials slot into it as a component you do not have to source, warehouse or ship — and your participants get local prices rather than newcomer prices.
For organisations sending working-holiday participants, remote workers or researchers rather than students, the same three options apply; only the item list changes.
One more thing your students can use for free
We built Stay Longer, a free multilingual travel planner powered by Korea Tourism Organization open data. It ranks Korean districts by how well a longer stay actually works there, shows festivals running during a student's exact dates, and includes barrier-free accessibility information. There is no account and no charge — several international offices' worth of "what should I do on weekends?" answered in one link. It is a reasonable thing to include in an orientation pack whether or not you ever work with us on anything else.
Start a conversation
Email contact@comfylanding.com. If you can include these in the first message, we can usually answer with something concrete straight away:
- Your institution and roughly how many students arrive per intake
- Arrival window or move-in date, if it is already fixed
- Whether accommodation provides bedding
- Whether the building accepts parcels before check-in
FAQ
Do you need a formal agreement?
No. Option A needs nothing signed at all. We are happy to put terms in writing if your procurement process requires it, but we do not ask for exclusivity and we do not ask for a commitment on volume.
Do you take a commission from the institution, or pay one?
Neither by default. Our margin is already inside the item prices, which is why there are no delivery or service fees. Where an agency's own model requires a referral arrangement, we can discuss it — but we will not build one that quietly raises the price your students pay.
What if a delivery goes wrong?
The student contacts us, not you. We handle the Korean-language side with the retailer or courier directly. Our terms are published on our site.
Can students order in their own language?
The site runs in seven languages: English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, German, French and Vietnamese. Support conversations are smooth in English, Korean and Japanese; other languages are welcome, with replies usually in English.
Can you deliver outside Seoul?
Yes — anywhere in Korea. Regional campuses are often where this matters most, since students there have fewer nearby shops and less English signage.
Who is behind this?
Comfy Landing is a registered Korean business (registration no. 207-21-26251), run by a Korean university student who did an exchange semester in Germany and built this after arriving back to the problem from the other side. Details are in the footer of our main site.
Also useful: How to order from Coupang without a Korean card · Weekend trips from Seoul without speaking Korean