The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) has been helping tourism businesses plan strategically, make informed decisions, and build capability by harnessing data-driven insights since 2018 with the Singapore Tourism Analytics Network (STAN).
By analysing consumer behaviour, market dynamics and product performance, STAN plays a critical role in providing deeper understanding of visitor segments for stakeholders in supporting STB’s Tourism 2040 growth ambitions, according to Industry Technology Transformation, director, Chew Chien Way.
Chew continued: “For our next round of digital transformation, we envision building a collaborative data ecosystem where industry partners and STB can share data.”
This, she elaborated, will enable the industry to identify potential opportunities; make strategic adjustments when there is a need to pivot from existing segments; and measure product affinity to target segments, in terms of how destination offerings can drive purpose of visits and extend visitors’ length of stay.
“For the immediate next five years, we have identified three emerging technologies to monitor. GenAI for improving productivity and enabling more personalised experiences; XR (Extended Realities) for immersive attractions; and robotics for alleviating manpower constraints.”
The emerging technologies, she explained, will be explored through enterprise-level pilots, and STB is keen to have more industry partners come onboard to trial and adopt the proven solutions.
Since 2020, Mandai Wildlife Group has been using STAN. Its assistant vice president, digital & data, Srihari Puthanveettil, shared: “By combining STAN’s inbound tourism trends with our own ticketing and in-park transactional (F&B and retail) data, we have gained a clearer understanding of how visitors from different markets engage with our precinct.”
Data is also used to identify high-value market segments and estimate potential revenue from both ticket sales and in-park spending and to direct marketing efforts to attract them.
STAN’s overnight visitor numbers, Puthanveettil shared, serve as a reliable anchor point, to combine with other forward-looking indicators like inbound airline bookings and flight capacity to anticipate shifts in demand, to fine-tune the group’s strategy and stay ahead of trends.
To further enhance STAN’s impact, he suggested more frequent updates – such as weekly tourist arrival numbers and more regular market forecasts.
Shengwen Chua, hotel manager, Four Seasons Hotel Singapore, which started accessing STAN in 2021, noted the year-on-year data trends, post-pandemic, were instrumental in providing more insight on how each market recovered at different speeds.
Tracking the monthly tourist arrival statistics, and source markets bringing in the largest volume of tourists, were “useful to compare against our own internal statistics to understand if we are getting our fair share of the market”, he noted.
The hotel was able to channel sales and marketing efforts to target specific countries with the highest demand, utilising its own lead time data to target a specific segment prior to their peak travel months.
Chua added: “Using STAN has helped our bottom line as we were able to identify potential opportunities… from identifying specific geographic sources where the hotel was not seeing a similar year-on-year increase in bookings in comparison to the STAN data, which in turn allowed us to achieve the targets we had set for ourselves.”
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