Chinese visitors top arrivals to Singapore

China has overtaken Indonesia as the largest source of visitor arrivals to Singapore last year, with the country’s tourism sector on the whole seeing an upswing in tourism receipts and visitor arrival figures notching record highs for the second consecutive year.

Tourism receipts rose by 3.9% to S$26.8 billion (US$20.2 billion) last year, according to the latest figures announced by Singapore Tourism Board (STB).

This was fuelled by growth in visitor arrivals across all top 10 markets and higher visitor arrivals from high-spending markets such as China, South Korea, United States and United Kingdom. For the U.S., higher arrivals under the business travel and MICE segments have added higher spends on shopping.

The country’s performance sits against a backdrop of a “better-than-expected global economic recovery, continued growth in Asia-Pacific travel and increase flight and cruise connectivity to Singapore,” said Lionel Yeo, STB’s chief executive.

The country also saw a broad-based growth in visitor arrivals across 13 of the top 15 markets that saw total arrivals rising by 6.2% to 17.4 million.

Figures show a slight reshuffling of the top five markets, with China (+13%, 3.23 million) taking the lead from Indonesia (+2%, 2.95 million), and India (+16%, 1.27 million) rising to third place, with the country making inroads beyond capital cities into tier two and tier three cities.

Malaysia (+1%) and Australia (+5%) round off the top five, with the Australia market rebounding for the first time since 2014 after the mining and commodities market in Western Australia took a dive.

Vietnam has cracked the top 10 source markets for the first time, posting a 13% increase with 531,000 visitors last year, while U.S. (+9%) inched up to ninth place with 565,000 visitors. Last year saw Thailand (-3%) and Hong Kong (-13%) dropping off the top 10.

“We saw an over 15% year-on-year growth in our US visitor arrivals in 2017, with most of the growth coming during the year-end winter season. We see mainly two types of clients – those here on fly-cruise programmes and leisure travellers who came here on tour groups or for individual travel,” commented Darren Tan, managing director of inbound travel agency World Express Group.

Continuing on its third year of strong growth, cruise holidays also notched a record high with throughput increasing by 17% to 1.38 million.

The total number of ship calls also rose by 3% to reach 421, of which 16 were maiden calls including built-for-Asia ships such as Majestic Princess, Norwegian Joy and World Dream.

The Business Travel and MICE segments also raked higher spending by 4% to S$3.15 billion, which offset a 5% dip in visitor arrivals to 1.75 million.

Looking ahead, Singapore is focussed on enticing more growth from its top source markets by expanding efforts beyond capital cities and cornering the FIT traveller segment through bolstering interest-based activities and bringing in unique programming and content.

The country has set its sights even higher. It is expecting to increase arrivals to 17.6 to 18.1 million to bring in S$27.1 to 27.6 million this year.

From the launch of its Passion Made Possible marketing campaign last August, STB will be rolling out the campaign in Germany and Australia within the next two months.