Singapore’s readiness for future tourism growth in 2030

In the first seven months of 2019, visitor arrivals to Singapore grew steadily to 11.1 million, largely driven by growth in the country’s top 10 visitor source markets, with six of the top ten showing y-o-y growth.

Notably, visitors from China grew by 5.2% year-on-year (“y-o-y”) to 2.2 million as at year-to-date (“YTD” July 2019, and accounted for around 20% of Singapore’s total visitor arrivals.

Chinese arrivals increased by 7.8% y-o-y in July 2019, representing the fifth consecutive month of y-o-y increase. Continued growth is expected to be supported by the Singapore Tourism Board’s (“STB”) recently signed partnership in April 2019 with Alibaba Group to drive visits and spending amongst the Chinese.

This will be done through joint marketing campaigns and understanding consumer behaviour patterns through travel analytics.In addition, new carriers at Changi Airport such as Guangxi Beibu Gulf Airlines, Shandong Airlines and Urumqi Air as well as new flight routes are expected to further fuel visitor growth from China.

This includes Chongqing Airlines’ launch of daily flights between Singapore and Chongqing in June; Urumqi Air’s thrice weekly flights to Urumqi via Wuhan in May and; Jetstar’s thrice-weekly charter service to Xuzhou in January, Singapore’s first flight connection to the Chinese city.

Further, STB also signed a partnership with Traveloka in April 2019. As a leading online travel platform in the region, the partnership is aimed at promoting Singapore as the preferred destination in key markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.