The number of foreigners who visited the country's resort island of Jeju plunged 82 percent on-year in August in the wake of Beijing's retaliation against Seoul's deployment of an advanced US missile shield, data showed Saturday.
The tally of foreigners who visited Jeju Island stood at 78,380 last month, down from 434,856 recorded the same month a year earlier, according to the data from the Jeju Tourism Organization.
The overall number of foreign tourists in the January-August period came to 975,277, down 60.7 percent from 2.48 million in the same months of 2016, the data showed.
The drop was largely attributed to the decline in the number of Chinese tourists after China banned the sale of group tours to South Korea in protest at the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system here.
(Yonhap)
Seoul and Washington insist THAAD is purely designed to counter missile threats from North Korea, but Beijing suspects the shield, which has a powerful radar system, could be used to spy on the Chinese military.
The number of Chinese nationals who visited Jeju last month dropped 90.2 percent on-year from 393,479 to 38,560.
South Korea's tourism industry has been ramping up efforts to promote domestic travel to locals and to diversify its tourist portfolio, which has heavily relied on Chinese nationals. Chinese visitors accounted for nearly half of all tourists who visited South Korea last year.
A total of 1.2 million South Koreans visited Jeju last month, up 11.1 percent from the 1.1 million tallied the same month a year earlier, the data showed.
According to a separate data compiled by local e-commerce site 11st, Jeju Island was the most popular tourist destination for South Koreans for the upcoming Chuseok holiday, which runs from Sept. 30 to Oct. 9, followed by Tokyo, Osaka and Bali. It declined to provide specific details on the sales figures. (Yonhap)
