Edmund Ong, general manager, Trip.com Singapore, explains how data and AI can help Singapore attract higher-value travellers, support tourism businesses and manage visitor growth
In a year marked so far by uncertainty and disruption, things have been far from smooth sailing for the travel industry. Fortunately, the appetite for international travel remained strong. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects air passenger traffic to grow by 2.1 per cent in 2026, slower than in recent years, but on a positive trajectory.
It helps that consumers increasingly view travel as an integral part of their lifestyle today rather than a discretionary luxury. Earlier this year, an American Express report revealed that 74 per cent of Millennials and Gen Zs consider travel a “non-negotiable” expense.
Still, Singapore faces a more challenging tourism outlook. Despite its strong tourism performance in recent years, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) is expecting spending to soften as macroeconomic conditions weigh on consumer and business demand.
This is already apparent in Indonesia, one of the top tourist source markets for Singapore, as the weakening rupiah is impacting demand for outbound travel, especially among the mid-market segment.
Singapore has already invested in new MICE facilities, cruise and air hub expansions, alongside ongoing upgrades to key tourism precincts like Orchard Road and Sentosa. The bigger question is whether these efforts can draw more travellers and tourist spending in the uncertain global climate and help Singapore achieve its 2040 tourism targets set last year.
Data-driven tourism
The key to driving tourism receipts that outpace tourist arrivals may hinge on targeting premium travellers less affected by the global situation and harnessing intelligence, two of the key ingredients needed to build Singapore’s next tourism advantage.
Trip.com data suggests that the opportunity is huge, with premium travellers to Singapore spending about 10 to 12 times more on average than mass-market travellers. On the intelligence front, combining search with AI has also lifted booking conversion rates by 4 per cent while reducing the effort required in search by 11 per cent, underscoring how smarter recommendations can translate interest into bookings faster.
As we celebrate World Tourism Day today, it’s timely that the theme for this year is Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism. Taken together, these developments show that intelligence is clearly becoming the next lever for tourism growth worldwide.
For Singapore, drawing on its strong digital foundations is the smart play. The city-state has already seen the benefits of data-driven tourism initiatives such as STB’s Data Analytics Shift (Commercial) Programme, which enabled tourism companies to refine their business strategies, reduce manual processes and enhance digital marketing efforts to better target relevant markets and visitor segments.
The next step would be to harness intelligence at scale, which means understanding what premium business and leisure travellers want, predicting when they need it, and providing it at the right moment. In other words, provide the intelligent recommendations that compress the decision-making process for travellers.
Data and AI offer a swift way to transform the travel experience, which is due for some improvements. For decades, digital catalogues have delivered long lists of hotels, flights and attractions for travellers.
Unfortunately, being spoilt for choice also means some consumers get confused and abandon their bookings. In a Travelport survey of American consumers in August, close to half said they had abandoned a booking because it became too complicated and time-consuming. Notably, 38 per cent said fewer options would improve their booking experience.
This is where intelligence comes in. Instead of travellers doing the searching, platforms do the understanding by surfacing the right recommendation at the right moment, based on the traveller’s profile and preferences. Besides delivering a better overall experience, this converts inspiration into decisions and bookings faster and with less effort.
As travellers increasingly rely on AI for inspiration and discovery, the ability to turn information and recommendations into “trusted intelligence” – insights that travellers can make decisions with – will determine if a booking is made.
And since launching TripGenie, our AI travel assistant, the feature increased our order volume fivefold year-on-year in 2025. It also kept travellers engaged with the app for over 20 minutes on average, roughly double the time of users who do not use the tool, indicating that it is driving deeper exploration and higher purchase intent.
The learning for Singapore is clear: in a market where every additional visitor is hard-won, intelligence is what turns a single visit into its fullest possible value.
Democratising intelligence for local tourism businesses
To fully realise its value across Singapore’s tourism ecosystem, intelligence must be easily accessible to the thousands of tourism businesses that need it most, not just the large platforms with vast traveller datasets.
Singapore already has the infrastructure for this, in the form of STB’s Tcube platform. It includes the Data Analytics Shift Programme (DASH), which gives tourism businesses data insights for smarter marketing, personalisation and revenue decisions, and the Singapore Tourism Analytics Network (STAN) that provides trusted, shared tourism datasets so operators can make data-driven decisions without needing their own data science teams.
STAN’s model has shown its effectiveness in practice. Developed in collaboration with Gardens by the Bay, Sentosa, Mandai Wildlife Group, Grab and Tencent, it has surfaced useful insights. For example, Chinese visitors on short stays of five days or less spend more when visiting Orchard Road, Marina Bay and Sentosa, compared with Indonesian visitors. This kind of granular, cross-operator pattern cannot be uncovered by a single company but is useful to any tourism-related business.
Travel platforms can also play a practical role. A Cornell study found 94 per cent of hotels are currently invisible in AI-generated travel recommendations. By helping hotel partners create structured, more discoverable digital content, from room attributes and amenities to nearby experiences and traveller reviews, we can make local offerings more visible to both travellers and AI-powered recommendation systems. In an age where discovery is increasingly shaped by AI, visibility will depend not just on being online, but on being relevant and trusted by the systems guiding traveller choices.
Balancing visitorship with sustainability
As tourism scales, the need to balance the impact of growing visitor traffic on infrastructure and people becomes more urgent. This should be something planned for in advance, with the help of data-driven visitor management.
Through it, destinations can anticipate where crowds will form, redirect demand toward underutilised attractions and precincts, and plan infrastructure and programming around actual movement patterns rather than guesswork.
Singapore is already putting this into practice. The STB employs digital twin technology to model visitor movement patterns, helping the city efficiently manage tourist hotspots and ensure sustainability across attractions and precincts.
Cities such as Barcelona are using big data from social media and mobile activity to track tourist flows and predict peak visitation, allowing visitors to check overcrowding levels at attractions before deciding whether to visit them.
Providing this level of granular data access to visitors can help alleviate overcrowding while ensuring that the city remains liveable as tourism continues to grow.
Optimism for the road ahead
If 2026 has taught us anything, it is that intelligence will be critical to the next phase of tourism growth in Singapore. When harnessed well, it will unlock value across the industry by accelerating decision-making for travellers, optimising demand generation for tourism businesses, and supporting sustainable growth without compromising liveability.
Singapore already has a good head start with its solid data foundations in place. The task now is to deepen and extend them, with tourism boards, travel platforms and businesses working together so that intelligence becomes fundamental to the country’s tourism advantage.
That is how a small nation, in an increasingly unpredictable world, can keep its Tourism 2040 ambitions firmly on track.
