A travel hack circulating amongst Chinese passengers to get free hot water at Seoul Incheon Airport for cup noodles is causing a furore in South Korea because it involves invading mother nursing rooms.
The problem has arisen because, while convenience stores inside the airport sell cup noodles (known in South Korea as cup ramyeon), they don’t provide free hot water – an essential component to enjoy the popular convenience food.
With apparently nowhere else to go to get hot water, Chinese tourists have discovered that mother and baby nursing rooms dotted throughout the airport offer free hot water.
It hasn’t taken long, however, for this IYKYK travel hack to go mainstream after users started posting detailed instructions on how to find and use the nursing rooms on the popular social media site, RedNote, the Chinese version of TikTok.
It didn’t take long for the airport to notice an influx of childless Chinese passengers suddenly making use of the nursing rooms, some of whom weren’t just using the rooms to fill up their cup noodles but also lounging around while slurping up their snack.
The nursing rooms have signs at the entrance which explicitly state that they are reserved for pregnant women and nursing mothers with infants and small children.
Some Chinese passengers who have tried to make use of the travel hack have now reported they are being booted from the nursing rooms, even if they just went in there to fill up their cup noodles, rather than using the rooms to eat them as well.
Unfortunately, transiting through Incheon Airport is the last opportunity that travelers have to snack on cup noodles for many hours, as the national flag carrier, Korean Air, now forbids passengers from consuming the snack on all of its flights.
In August 2024, Korean Air announced it would no longer serve cup noodles as a mid-flight snack in Economy Class over fears that the popular food item could result in serious scald injuries.
Up to that point, passengers loved the fact that they could enjoy a cup noodle in between main meal services while flying with Korean Air, but that all changed in the wake of a fatal turbulence incident aboard a Singapore Airlines flight from London Heathrow in May 2024.
Like many airlines, Korean Air decided to review its own turbulence procedures as a result of this incident and came to the conclusion that the risk of boiling hot water splashing out of a cup noodle during turbulence was too great to justify continuing to serve the snack.
Along with the cup noodle ban, Korean Air also doubled the time at which flight attendants are required to stop in-flight service and prepare the cabin for landing, going from just 20 minutes to landing to 40 minutes.
The decision arises from research that shows the vast majority of turbulence-related injuries occur during the descent phase of a flight, which, on a long-haul flight, typically starts at around the 40 minutes to touchdown mark.
