Dragged down by such weak inbound traffic, the total number of foreigners who visited South Korea last month fell 33.7 percent on-year to 1.1 million from 1.6 million, according to the data.

Chinese visitors accounted for nearly half of the 17 million foreigners that visited the country last year.

The sharp decline in Chinese tourists has been widely expected as Beijing has banned its travel agencies from selling package tours bound to South Korea since mid-March in an apparent retaliation over Seoul's deployment of a US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system.

The ban, which especially has wrecked havoc on South Korea's retail and duty-free companies, has yet to be lifted.

The KTO said that while numbers have fallen, the rate of decline in Chinese visitors slowed last month from the 69.3 percent on-year drop reported in July.

South Korea also saw the number of visitors from the Philippines and Indonesia plunge 38.1 percent and 44.5 percent on-year in August, respectively, according to the data.

The drop from the two countries was mainly attributed to difficulty in securing flight tickets to South Korea amid a sharp increase in demand for flights to the two Southeast Asian countries here during the peak holiday season, the KTO said.

The number of outbound South Korean nationals came to 2.38 million in August, up 15.6 percent from 2.06 million a year earlier, the data showed. (Yonhap)