Singapore’s survival kit

What happens when the world shuts down and your entire existence is based on an open world?

That’s the dilemma that Singapore found itself in when the pandemic was declared. 

I live in Singapore and run a business here; my life is inextricably linked to both my adopted home and the travel industry. What I have witnessed over the past nine months is an unfolding drama and, in its midst, the emergence of the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) as the primary protagonist. How does an organization designed to attract international inbound travel maintain relevance when there is no inbound international travel?

The answer is that it must ensure that the entities that attract visitors in the first place survive the crisis, and that when travel resumes, everything will be in place to encourage and enable visitation.

At times it has felt like I was viewing a Netflix horror series in which you wonder whether the next episode could possibly get any worse. Other times, it was more like watching a superhero movie, cheering on the underdog as it takes on the giants with seemingly greater superpowers than it can ever dream of possessing.

Let’s face it, in a global world gone local, Singapore is an underdog. Unlike countries that have the resources to shut themselves off from the rest of the world for a period of time, this country of under 6 million people residing in 781 square miles absolutely needs an open world to function. (By comparison, Canada has 38 million people living across nearly 4 million square miles.) 

Since independence 55 years ago, Singapore has had to look outward to build its fortunes. From the early tea merchants to modern tech (aspiring) unicorns, the one thread that unites them is the necessity to look abroad for growth and scale. 

Singapore is the original hybrid state: small physical footprint but big virtual reach. For businesses based here like the one I founded, Web in Travel (now owned by Travel Weekly parent company Northstar Travel Group), Singapore has always been a springboard to the outside world. Consequently, you have a massive problem when the outside world is, for all intents and purposes, closed off.

How has Singapore faced the challenge, kept the travel industry alive and strengthened relationships during a time when governments have lost trust in each other?

1. Creating a domestic market from scratch

First, Singapore made a wholesale shift in thought and deed from outward-looking to inward-looking. It’s been pretty impressive (I will use this word a few times in this report) how the STB went from one structured primarily as a global marketing machine to promoting domestic tourism, almost overnight. 

The $34 million SingapoRediscovers campaign to encourage staycations was the first volley. It launched in late July and is funded to last until late April, which gives an indication of how long the STB was expecting the crisis would last, at that time.

A month later, the government announced it would set aside $239 million in vouchers that Singaporeans could spend on hotels stays, attraction tickets and/or tours in their own country. In mid-October, it selected five travel platforms to offer redemption services for the vouchers: Klook, Traveloka, Trip.com, GlobalTix and Changi Travel Services. 

2. Opening travel, safely and responsibly 

While all this is going on — let’s face it, these initiatives are but to buy time for local businesses to survive until borders open — it’s been hard at work with other ministries to restart travel on all fronts. It was the first country in the world to shut borders to China back on March 24, and it has also become the first country to try to reopen borders with countries willing to negotiate with it. 

You can imagine the machinery at work among ministries to make this happen. If you were a fly on the wall in one of those meetings, you’d likely hear the Ministry of Health preferring to play it safe (we have been bitten once, we can’t risk it again), Trade and Transportation trying to get things moving again (if we don’t, our airport, airline, travel will die) and so on.

Things began moving surely but ever so slowly. The first all-purpose, no-restrictions travel corridor (with PCR testing) was to be between Singapore and Hong Kong, announced for Nov. 22. But it has since been deferred till 2021 due to rising cases in Hong Kong. Needless to say, this is a big disappointment to both cities because it had been hoped that if this corridor worked, similar lanes could be started to other regional destinations that have managed to control Covid infections.

With rigorous safety protocols in place, cruises to nowhere have started. Dream Cruises’ inaugural sailing of the World Dream had 1,400 passengers who all had to take Antigen Rapid Tests before boarding. And on Dec. 1, Royal Caribbean International began its cruises to nowhere on the Quantum of the Seas (see story, Page 14). 

Singapore is also opening meetings and events, with delegate numbers creeping up from 50 to 250 and, recently, 500 per session for TravelRevive, Singapore’s first physical travel trade show.

And in a real coup, the World Economic Forum announced last week that its global meeting is moving to Singapore from Davos, Switzerland, in 2021.

3. From Rave to Revive

It wasn’t so long ago that the STB created TravelRave, an event focused on inbound international travel. This year, however, its most prominent showpiece was TravelRevive 2020, held on Nov 25 and 26. 

Flagged as Singapore’s first and largest hybrid travel trade show since the March shutdown, it drew a total of 1,000 delegates — in person — over two days, including 65 international guests from 14 countries. These visitors had to take tests daily and were placed on “bubble-wrapped” itineraries. 

I signed up and took my first test to attend the second day, which was focused on conferences and exhibitions. 

If there’s one thing Singapore excels at, it’s processes. The protocols put in place around zoning and safe distancing were formidable.

And the technology was impressive, as well: Contactless registration, a hybrid stage at Marina Bay Sands with giant iPad-like panels showing virtual speakers alongside physical ones, and mixed reality capabilities to bring storytelling to the next level. 

It revived spirits for people to meet in person. There’s pent-up demand for people to be with people, but I also suspect that events — and we as consumers — have moved on in some ways. We can’t go backwards; Covid has changed customer expectations as well as habits. 

We now know what virtual events can or can’t do and that we have choices. Going forward, we’re going to ask: Could I have attended this event on Zoom or any other platform? Is it necessary for me to be there physically? 

These questions will linger long after Covid is a distant memory. I think no one will again want to sit in darkened ballrooms, listening to one-way monologues, with minimal engagement between speakers and audience (and, truth be told, often with our heads down, looking at our phones). We might as well do that at home, where at least we can go to the fridge whenever we want. No one wants to sit in isolated booths, waiting for the next buyer to walk by. 

It’s the difference between listening to a singer on Spotify and showing up live in a stadium. Do you prefer the live experience so much that it justifies the expense?

4. A slew of partnerships … and questions

In tandem with these moves to reopen things on the ground, the STB has also been busy signing partnerships with several travel tech brands. 

The Singapore shift to domestic has been good for Hong Kong-based tours and activities startup Klook. On top of the $1.5 million deal it got as part of the Singapo- Rediscover campaign, it’s also one of the five companies chosen to handle the voucher side of the program.

Two deals were signed in October, one with Expedia and the other with Airbnb Experiences. The former is a two-year global marketing partnership to first boost the local industry and later strengthen Singapore’s position as a destination of choice when international travel resumes.

The partnership with Airbnb “will jointly drive quality travel experiences in Singapore as well as encourage Singapore tourism industry players to digitize and pivot towards innovative hybrid business models,” according to the press release announcing the deal. 

Following up, the STB announced a three-year memorandum of understanding with Trip.com Group to jointly market Singapore as the destination of choice to Chinese consumers and to enhance visitors’ experience in Singapore. As part of the agreement, the Chinese OTA set up its international headquarters in the city.

With these partnerships, you can say the STB is trying to cover all its bases. China is leading global travel recovery by several giant steps, and it could well be the savior of Singapore’s inbound tourism when borders reopen, so a partnership with the Chinese travel giant makes sense. 

With its Expedia and Airbnb partnerships, global interests are protected, and with Klook, it will stay in front of the young and independent segment in Asia.

Not surprisingly, those who feel left out are disgruntled. Why these particular partnerships, ones that only favor foreign and predominantly online brands? Why isn’t the STB supporting smaller local and midsize businesses, online and offline, to survive this long, long winter? There are more than 200 travel agents in Singapore who may feel they are being overlooked in this slew of partnership deals.

The answer, I guess, in this context is that the STB is primarily a marketing organization to increase inbound traffic and has to work with companies it feels have the global reach to stir demand when the time is right. But still, the question needs to be raised: What is the duty of a tourism board when smaller travel agencies offline and online are being devastated?

5. Mission critical for aviation: Maintain trust 

What must travel businesses in Singapore do to survive until inbound tourism returns? The reality is that we must accept that inbound tourism will not be returning at any meaningful level in the near term and prepare for that. Even if Singapore were willing to open its borders, there are few other governments willing to reciprocate at the same level. 

I recently listened to a panel put together by the Australian-based aviation data company CAPA that featured Jeff Shane, the newly retired general counsel of IATA, and Eammon Brennan, director general of Eurocontrol, the organization responsible for air safety in Europe. By the time it was over, I wasn’t sure whether I should just slit my wrists, so dire and gloomy were the outlooks of these two aviation experts.

Brennan called it a “meltdown,” and I believe he used the word “catastrophe” as much as I use the word “impressive.” Shane and Brennan recalled the Convention on International Civil Aviation (also known as the Chicago Convention, signed on Dec. 7, 1944, by 52 countries), a time when governments had lost trust in each other. Yet the whole concept of international aviation is built on a system of trust, that governments trust each other. And that trust has been eroded by the pandemic.

What Brennan couldn’t get over is the fact that “it’s a single virus” and “we cannot come up with a single protocol, single test” when the EU had solved things like a single market and a single currency. 

Both executives said the virus had been politicized and that politicians, as well as bodies like the World Health Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization, were paying more attention to responding to media than the single problem they were supposed to be tackling.

With every word they uttered, my hopes sank, but then they lifted again when Brennan and Shane proposed a bet to Peter Harbison, chairman emeritus of CAPA. International, long-haul corporate travel will return to its former glorious level by 2024 because, the challengers said, “you cannot solve the world economy on Zoom.” 

Loser(s) buy(s) winner(s) a pint of Guinness. (I know as a journalist I’m supposed to be impartial, but for our sake, I hope Harbison loses.)

Quoting a speaker at the meeting in 1944, Shane said, “Nothing proves the value of air transport more convincingly than the absence of it.” 

Well, we are certainly feeling it in 2020. 

Meantime, we must continue to fight the battles we can on the ground while the powers-that-are dither and try to figure out how to get us back in the air. 

Some, of course, have more ground than others. Some, like Singapore, have less.

But every inch of ground is worth fighting for.

Even if it’s only 280 square miles.