Trip.com Group’s data revealed sharp increases in domestic and international travel consumption as China’s May Day holiday climbed in popularity.
International flights during the holidays recovered to around 40% over the same period in 2019, with searches increasing by more than 60% compared to 2019.
Chinese cities continue to focus on domestic tourism by offering VIP services and experiences
Compared to the Chinese New Year holiday (January 21 to 27), Ctrip platform data reports that flight bookings from China to South-east Asian countries during the May Day holiday have increased by 91%. Flight bookings to Japan and South Korea increased by 120% and 204%, respectively, while longhaul flight bookings to Europe have grown by over 40%.
Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, and the UK were the top 10 most booked overseas destinations for the holiday period.
The Ctrip platform also showed that Bangkok, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur were popular with first-time travellers aged 18 to 23.
Jane Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group, said: “The May Day holiday has ushered in the first wave of outbound tourism growth this year, driving recovery and local service capabilities.
”With capacity continuing to increase, Chinese consumers will soon seek destinations beyond Asia-Pacific and return to longhaul travel to EMEA and the Americas. We continue to work with global partners to ensure capacity and safeguard the pent-up travel demand seen from Chinese mainland consumers.”
Meanwhile, Chinese cities continue to focus on domestic tourism. Numerous scenic spots joined hands with Trip.com Group’s Ctrip platform to offer VIP services and special activity packages to provide a wide range of experience options for May Day visitors.
As of April 19, bookings for domestic hotels, flights and scenic spot tickets for the May Day holiday on the Ctrip platform surpassed 2019’s level.
The top 10 cities were Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, Xi’an, Wuhan and Shenzhen.
According to data from Ctrip’s FlightAi market insight platform, more than 80,000 domestic flights were operated this May Day, with the average daily level increasing by around 15% compared to the same period in 2019.
Escaping the city and embracing the rural areas has become a holiday choice for more users. Ctrip data shows that during May Day, the overall volume of rural tours has recovered to 242% of the same period in 2019, and the proportion of orders from tourists staying in the countryside for more than three days has increased by 230% compared to 2019.
The overall volume for Trip.com Group’s Country Retreats increased by 261% year-on-year. Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hangzhou became the most vibrant cities for countryside tours.
Malaysia-based hotel data and AI platform, ADATA, has plans to expand its offerings to countries in South-east Asia by 4Q2024, with approval from the ASEAN Hotel and Restaurant Association.
The Association finalised a Memorandum of Understanding with ADATA late last year to expand the services ADATA was providing to Malaysian hotels by collecting hotel performance data and making it freely available to the hospitality industry. Data on average room rate, average occupancy rate and hotel inventory could be searched by proximity, competitor set, city, state and country.
Goh: ADATA serves as a primary source of hotel industry performance data
ADATA set up a representative office in Bangkok two months ago and it plans to launch full access of data to Thai hotels sometime in 3Q2023. It also plans to launch a representative office in Brunei Darussalam by this year-end and the rest of ASEAN member countries by 4Q2024.
The platform works on data sharing within the hospitality industry in order to promote growth and healthy competition instead of collecting and selling data. This ensures that all hotels, regardless of size and brands, gain free access to much needed data for operational and strategic planning.
Those outside of the hotel industry, such as media outlets, banks, research and valuation houses, will have to pay for information access.
ADATA director, CS Goh, shared: “In addition to providing valuable data insights to hotels, ADATA also serve as a primary source of hotel industry performance data to policy makers, media and the travel industry stakeholders. The consolidation of data from independent, local and international chains of hotels and the availability of timely, accurate and granular insights, like segmented analytics, promotes a healthy environment for travel related investments.”
Goh said his closest competitor was STR Global, but claims that ADATA is miles ahead in terms of hotel coverage, with more than 400 hotels in Malaysia including independent, local and international chains. ADATA’s investment in artificial intelligence capabilities for performance trend prediction further strengthens its market leadership.
The company is currently funded privately. Riding on the high growth of the region’s travel industry, ADATA has reached financial breakeven point and is well positioned to achieve significant profitability as it expands its footprint over the region.
Independent hotel management company La Vie Hotels & Resorts has rolled out a new lifestyle brand, NOOE, as well as the first property to carry this label.
NOOE properties promise to be a place where great things happen, where lobbies are buzzing, restaurants serve local favourites, pools double up as day clubs, and gyms build both mental and physical wellness. Guests are invited to lounge in studios, suites, bungalows and villas, not rooms, and sharply designed spaces inspire work and creativity, as much as rest and relaxation.
NOOE Maldives Kunaavashi is the first NOOE property by La Vie Hotels & Resorts
Craig Bond, managing director of La Vie Hotels & Resorts, said: “We have been working on creating the NOOE brand for some time now, and we are thrilled to be launching this new lifestyle offering in the Maldives with our partners CJL Investments.
“The NOOE brand brings together what it means to live a balanced lifestyle; blending work, play, relaxation, good food and drink, and adventure all into one, and we are excited to grow the brand in other resort and urban locations.”
The first NOOE property is NOOE Maldives Kunaavashi. It features 72 bungalows and villas across three hectares, 39 of which boast an overwater location; six F&B outlets; a Dive & Watersports Centre; kǔlh·un’ (Play) Kids Club; Boutique Shop; and Th·āri by Mandara Spa, which has three private treatment rooms and a range of curated treatment options.
“The Maldives has always been known as a bucket list destination for travellers across the globe, so what better place to launch a new lifestyle brand that promotes a balanced holiday than the place everyone dreams of visiting,” said Bond.
“We’ve long seen a gap in the market for an upscale lifestyle brand and see huge growth opportunities for urban and resort properties within this segment across Asia-Pacific.”
Airbnb has introduced Airbnb Rooms, a new take on the original Airbnb and one that is said to provide a more authentic way to experience a city.
Every Airbnb Room features a Host Passport, which helps guests get to know their host before booking their stay – hosts will share more details about themselves, like where they went to school, what they do for work, a fun fact about themselves, and much more.
Airbnb’s Host Passport helps guests to learn more about their host before booking their stay
“With Airbnb Rooms, we’re getting back to the idea that started it all – back to our founding ethos of sharing,” said Brian Chesky, Airbnb co-founder and CEO. “Airbnb Rooms are often more affordable than hotels, and they’re the most authentic way to experience a city. This is the soul of Airbnb.”
The platform has also created a Rooms category with over one million listings, redesigned filters and added new privacy features, such as whether the bedroom door has a lock or if the host will be in the home during the guest’s stay.
Other new features and upgrades include total price display, transparent checkout instructions, improved maps, redesigned wish lists, more affordable monthly stays, payment instalments, and instant rebooking credit if a host were to cancel within 30 days of arrival.
In addition, Airbnb has created a dedicated all-day support team for priority access.
For hosts, Airbnb has launched improvements such as new pricing tools to help hosts set competitive prices, add weekly and monthly discounts, and compare their listing to similar ones in their area, as well as a yearly view in calendar, the ability to easily enter checkout instructions, read receipts and new quick replies in messaging, and more.
With requests for commercial networking opportunities to be included in Very Local Trip’s personalised tour itineraries becoming more popular, Maxime Besnier launched My Local Fixer, a bleisure-focused platform for customers who want to add value to their vacation time.
For nearly a decade, Very Local Trip has provided individual tour experiences, initially in Bangkok but now in other cities throughout South-east Asia and beyond. The concept is simple: the company’s team (Local Friends) creates a day of activities based on the client’s profile and list of interest.
Besnier leverages on his business connections in Thailand to find the right people to organise bleisure experiences for clients
The Local Friend is the company’s upgrade of a traditional tour guide, a term the founder has erased from his vocabulary.
Besnier shared: “Our Local Friend backgrounds are all highly varied. We have journalists, bloggers, photographers, artists, artisans, and expatriate wives and husbands working for us. But what they have in common is that they are all passionate about their interests, enthusiastic communicators, and hyper-curious urban explorers.”
By matching a client with a Local Friend who shares the same interests, it turns the average holiday into an enriching field trip researching how the individual’s hobbies and interests are represented in a new location.
“The guests (don’t) have to change their plans to suit us; we fit the tour around them,” he explained.
The itinerary is also completely flexible, so, for example, if a guest needs to run an errand, which can be overwhelming in an unfamiliar city, the Local Friend, can use their local knowledge to turn a mundane task, like mending a zip or fixing a shoe heel, into a fascinating peek into a different culture.
The evolution of Besnier’s core concept of providing curated cultural experiences, such as shopping, meeting local artists, or discovering the best local street food, by the company’s Local Friends after a one-on-one consultation was an organic process.
He said: “The line between business and leisure travel has been blurring for a while; and with the pandemic causing more people to work from home than ever before, the blur between work and social spaces became even more significant.
“I’d noticed an increase in agency requests and customer interviews, and realised that Very Local Trip was already creating bleisure experiences for clients. For one client, we organised a two-day itinerary; one half devoted to cultural pursuits, and the other was a full day visiting textile factories we had selected that matched their commercial interests. They went home with five new contacts, exactly in their core business – so it was a great added value for them.”
He added: “For most of our customers, rest and relaxation is the reason for travelling, but while they are there, why not take the opportunity to do a little business?
He leverages on his business connections in Thailand to find the right people to organise these experiences, something which DMCs may not be able to provide due to not having the right networks or resources.
The next few years will be busy for Besnier as My Local Fixer builds a footing in Thailand. At the same time, Very Local Trip continues to expand its presence in Asia, with operations in India, Japan, Cambodia, and Malaysia gaining velocity after Covid-19 stalled travel.
The company’s new launches in Australia and New Zealand are also proving successful.
Yet, Besnier is never content, and has eyes on another territory – the Philippines.
“From a logistical perspective, it’s not the easiest place to navigate, and it’s hard to find a good DMC in the Philippines, so there is plenty of potential for success there. (Most) crucially, my wife and my son are from Pawan in the Philippines, and it would mean a lot to them if we develop more experiences there and spend more time in their home country,” he explained.
Accor has signed a development agreement with Amsa Hospitality to develop and franchise 18 hotels across second-tier cities within Saudi Arabia over the next 10 years.
The Saudi start-up company will develop a range of Accor’s economy and midscale brands, including ibis Styles, Mercure, Mercure Living, Novotel, Novotel Living, and the recently launched Handwritten Collection, and act as the third-party operator by leasing and franchising the assets.
From left: Amsa Hospitality’s Mohammad Alathel and Accor’s Duncan O’Rourke
Speaking at a press conference during Arabian Travel Market last week, Mohammad Alathel, CEO, Amsa Hospitality, said that the company is aligned with the Kingdom’s plan for the development of the country’s second-tier cities.
“Such an enterprising strategy must be accompanied by quality hospitality, offering the best international standards,” he said. “Committed as we are, we believe that Accor is the finest hospitality company to deliver the high level of guaranteed quality we are looking for, together with their wide choice of brands, giving us the ability to propose the optimum hospitality regarding each city environment.”
As part of the agreement, Amsa Hospitality will be responsible for hotels in several cities in Saudi Arabia.
Duncan O’Rourke, CEO, MEA & Asia Pacific – premium, midscale & economy division, Accor, remarked: “Securing a long-term relationship with Amsa Hospitality underscores our commitment to supporting the Kingdom’s tourism goals while maintaining the focus on the Arabian traditions and Arab culture that Amsa Hospitality is focused on delivering.”
Banyan Tree Krabi has unveiled a new longtail boat that will take its guests on day trips and island-hopping excursions during their stay.
Built by local craftsmen using materials sourced from around Krabi, The White Pearl offers luxury and comfort on board for up to eight passengers.
Banyan Tree Krabi offers day trips and island-hopping excursions on its new longtail boat
Visitors can choose from either a half-day longtail boat trip to nearby Koh Hong or a full-day (eight-hour) tour of the four islands among the islets of Hat Noppharat Thara-Mu Ko Phi Phi National Park, where the boat anchors for guests to spend the day swimming and snorkelling in undisturbed clear waters.
All day trips on The White Pearl include fresh coconut, fruit and soft drinks, snorkelling equipment, life vests, toilets, and an English-speaking Boat Host.
Private bookings for non-guests are also available.
There is a huge opportunity for tourism to help rural areas by improving the well-being of residents, maintaining population, creating jobs, and even reviving local agricultural businesses and traditions, opines Sandra Carvao, chief of tourism market intelligence and competitiveness at United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
In this episode, Carvao recalls the formation of the Best Tourism Villages by UNWTO initiative, details why supporting rural development is so important, what is being done to ensure successful tourism villages do not lose themselves to commercialisation, and more.
While still in its early stages of development, having launched only in November 2022, the artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has lured major OTAs with its use potential.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is able to take prompts – or questions – from human users and sweep through vast data on the Internet to generate a human-like and comprehensive response. Its capability is regarded as a major step up from the chatbots the world has been relying on, which are only able to respond with structured answers to a limited set of keywords and instructions.
So appealing is ChatGPT that, according to Similarweb, it gained 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after its launch. Its developer, OpenAI, also became one of the 50 most visited websites in the world, found Digital-adoption.com.
Making sense of what that adoption rate meant, Time magazine wrote that Instagram took 2.5 years to reach 100 million users while TikTok got there in nine months.
Among the companies that are riding the ChatGPT wave are Trip.com and Expedia Group.
In February, Trip.com unveiled TripGen, a chatbot that is integrated with the OpenAI API and designed to provide travellers with live assistance through artificial intelligence (AI) technology, enabling users to receive tailored travel routes, itineraries and booking advice in real time on the Trip.com platform.
TripGen supports English, Japanese, Korean and traditional Chinese, with more languages to be added in the future. Work is also being done to allow users to book directly with Trip.com after TripGen searches, and to integrate with the new WhisperAPI for speech-to-text transcription and translation.
Amy Wei, senior product director at Trip.com Group, told TTG Asia: “Users can make more complex requests, such as suggestions for a romantic holiday. Business travellers (with packed schedules) can easily enquire about one- or two-day tours. This is an efficient way of finding out and narrowing down information for time-starved travellers.”
So far, response to TripGen has been good, according to Wei. User numbers have been doubling every day since it launched, with users asking four to five questions during their searches.
In March, Expedia Group introduced a plugin for ChatGPT users to bring their travel conversations to life. Powered by Expedia Group’s 70 petabytes of travel data, the Expedia pluggin allows ChatGPT users to get real recommendations on how to get to a desired destination, where to stay, and what to see and do.
Barely a month later, Expedia Group deepened its ChatGPT use by bringing a ChatGPT trip planning capability into its app. The new function allows Expedia members to have an open-ended conversation in the Expedia app for recommendations on destination activities and tourism products, and have hotels discussed in the conversation saved for future booking. Expedia members can choose dates, check availability, and add on other trip components, such as flights, cars, or activities.
The conversational trip planning beta experience is rolling out globally in English on the Expedia iOS app.
Kurt Weinsheimer, chief solutions officer at Sojern, a marketing specialist for hotels, attractions, and destinations, said these ChatGPT integrations are “exciting and inevitable”.
“Travel experts (right away) saw the potential of ChatGPT to offer an end-to-end user experience. It can help in the (travel) planning stage… and also tell that story when (travellers) are done with their trip,” he told TTG Asia.
“ChatGPT, Natural Language Processing (NPL) and AI require… content. The algorithms that power them need a ton of data in order to maximise their potential. Hence, having ChatGPT partner with a travel company like Kayak Group or Expedia Group makes a ton of sense. Now, a travel enquiry on ChatGPT will not just give you broad information and ideas, but very specific options that can be pulled from Kayak’s data and lead the customer to real-time rates, availability and a booking function,” he explained.
A boost for marketing
The conversational nature of ChatGPT’s output has not escaped the eyes of travel and tourism marketers.
Weinsheimer said: “In the history of tech, we know that innovations have taken away some roles only to replace them with new ones. Calculators did not take away math jobs; they allowed mathematicians to advance to higher levels of computing and engineering. So, we see NLP providing an opportunity to enhance content creation. It will be good for good writers and make marketers even better at their job.”
Ewan Cluckie, founder of Thailand-based travel operator and distributor, Tripseed, has “done some quite extensive testing with ChatGPT”.
Cluckie sees potential use cases for it within the travel industry, particularly in content creation. “It can speed up copywriting tasks and rewrites, and help to lay basic structure,” he remarked.
“I have also found it can be surprisingly competent at the localisation of existing content for different language markets,” he added.
Joleena Seah, managing director – Southeast Asia with leading regional publicity agency, GHC Asia, told TTG Asia that her company has been experimenting with the possible uses of ChatGPT and alternatives, like YouChat and Bing. Her team recently chose ChatGPT to trial a questionnaire that sought to draw media representatives’ opinion on a hospitality brand.
Seah said: “ChatGPT and the likes can be useful for our line of work. We could use it to start a draft for itinerary suggestions, drafting general factsheets and FAQs for our clients (destinations, hotels or brands), researching ideas to promote destinations, and understanding guest sentiments, and more, before we embellish the content. Basically, ChatGPT can help us to reduce time spent on research so that we can add more value to our clients’ press materials.”
However, Weinsheimer emphasised that travel and tourism companies should not limit their vision to just ChatGPT. Rather, they need to think about their investment in big data and AI in general.
He said: “It is a challenging time for marketers today. A recent study shows that over 70 per cent of consumers want a personalised experience, and almost the same percentage expressed concerns about how their data is being used.”
Balancing personalised experience in a permission-based world can be attained through AI, he opined. Sojern uses AI to predict the likelihood of travellers acting in a certain way or wanting certain experiences.
“You need models to go through billions of data points to come up with the right matches. You also need to understand that within those billions of travellers, there will be those that don’t want to get advertisements,” he said.
With AI, Sojern is able to fine-tune the audience, and provide the opt-in audience with the right messages at the right time for the maximum impact.
“The same way that we see ChatGPT is leveraging conversational data to write personalised experiences, big data and AI can be used to create personalised marketing and advertising. AI is here to stay, and it is up to companies to leverage it to minimise the number of monotonous tasks they have to deal with, and free them up to do more interesting, revenue-generating work,” said Weinsheimer.
Expedia members can move from trip recommendations to bookings
Limitations
As promising as ChatGPT is, corporate users are clear about the chatbot’s limitations – the system relies on data on the Internet and, for now, its knowledge is limited to 2021 content. And with it accessing an assortment of published data online, there is also the possibility of it pulling inaccurate information.
People with subject matter expertise continue to remain important even as ChatGPT comes into the picture, asserted Weinsheimer.
“ChatGPT is sometimes accurate and other times not quite, but it is always 100 per cent confident. And that’s where you need human experts to ascertain accuracy,” he said.
Seah said: “There are also limitations when a job requires senior leadership’s personal insights, brand messages and new announcements. Most of our work involve hotel launches and new brand initiatives, which render AI chatbots ineffective because these information are not yet available on the Internet.”
Thiam Wei Toh, founder and chief storyteller of Indie Singapore Tours, has trialled chatbots for customer service and the creation of itineraries, but found that “even (OpenAI’s latest) GPT-4 is still a bit off from being able to be properly harnessed”.
Thiam is looking into other AI tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Copy.ai to to help with content generation and productivity.
Cluckie agrees that ChatGPT and the likes “will not be replacing any jobs anytime soon”.
“We’ve being doing more extensive testing on the localisation of content for different markets but even this still requires a human editor. The inaccuracies in content produced by ChatGPT, and the generic blandness of its responses, are still far too prevalent for it to be used as much more than a writing aid,” said Cluckie.
He added that the system’s reliance on training data prevents it from generating original thought.
“Innovation and originality is, for now at least, still safely within the biological domain. In the context of travel, this limitation means that tools like ChatGPT inherently perpetuate issues such as overtourism unless specifically prompted otherwise, and even then, they are fundamentally limited to what is already provided to them in their training data,” he said.
To address potential inaccuracies, Trip.com is working to embed booking links into TripGen, so that the existence of system-recommended products can be verified, shared Wei.
On Expedia’s part, its collaboration with OpenAI is currently in the beta testing phase, allowing it to rapidly evolve the experience based on members’ interaction.
“It’s also important to remember that while many measures have been taken to limit inaccurate results and inappropriate responses, at times the experience may not work exactly as expected. Feedback from both our employees and all those using the experience will be continually evaluated to make sure responses meet our standards,” commented Rathi Murthy, CTO, Expedia Group.
To travel companies eager to weave ChatGPT and similar AI functions into their system, Murthy has a word of advice: “Travel is a complex industry with lots of tech debt, so before companies can integrate with technologies like ChatGPT, they need to make sure the technological fundamentals of their platform are sound, and their data quality is high.”
It would be a long-term investment. She said: “For AI to truly deliver on its potential, including commercially, it requires large quantities of high-quality data and a highly skilled team; it must be viewed as an essential part of the infrastructure to run a business, and it needs time. AI is not productive or efficient on day one – it takes time to get the data, train, evolve and scale up the models. It’s an ongoing capability and there’s not really an end in terms of value that it can bring to a business.”
Singapore Tourism Board refines marketing messages to appeal to more targeted audiences
Manpower limitations and sustainability constraints are challenging considerations
Singapore to leverage on its progressive and innovative identity recognised by the world
Singapore will be revitalised as a destination offering quality tourism
Singapore Tourism Board (STB) unveiled in April its plans to sustain and future-proof the industry, with chief executive Keith Tan stating that the blueprint zeroes in on “quality tourism”, “driving higher yield” and “creating good jobs”.
While details are still to come, these strategic and significant innovations will give Singapore a shot-in-the-arm in finding the new equilibrium for quality tourism amid a post-lockdown supply and demand environment.
STB’s Tan acknowledged that “Singapore cannot be a low-cost destination”, and manpower limitations and having to deal with sustainability constraints were “hard truths”.
The post-lockdown supply chain may still be playing catch-up, but pundits believe the city-state can and will reinvent itself.
For Arthur Kiong, CEO, Far East Hospitality Management, the reality is that hotels need to be able to pay better wages not only to retain but to attract staff.
Nobody is oblivious to how severely the industry is being challenged and that “it is a real struggle”, he noted.
But Kiong is confident there will be transformational paths to cope with delivering an experience with less manpower and charging more.
“Quality tourism is not only a vision, but a functionality and derivative of business reality today. Singapore has to go after certain segments, (and offer compelling reasons and propositions that are sustainable),” he explained.
According to Kiong, Singapore’s “secret weapon” is the ability of trade associations, government and the private sector to cooperate and pull stakeholders together, citing how Singapore managed the Covid-19 pandemic.
The success of the STB blueprint rests on the ability of execution and “nowhere in the region or in the world” can do it like Singapore, he proffered.
Setting standards in Singapore An industry practitioner questioning how Singapore’s vision of quality tourism should be defined, asked: “Are we talking about product innovation and differentiation in the type of hotels, retail concepts and the culture being played up?”
There are certain expectations of what a multifaceted global destination is, where the visitor comes for the experience and is willing to pay, he said, and while regional competition is “so competitive”, Singapore stands out because it has “some element of a cultural identity that is significantly progressive and innovative”.
Kiong: quality tourism is not only a vision, but a functionality and derivative of business reality today
He explained: “Singapore is a hub with a transformative environment and that sets it apart. It is where start-ups can benchmark against Hong Kong or Shanghai if they want to go into China, or are interested in Delhi or Mumbai.
“Singapore needs to make a lot of noise about being able to provide the opportunity to meet different people and form new networks to create a global community.
“If Singapore is to be laser-focused on quality tourism, it has to set the tone and what quality tourism is, where the new basic is a S$250 to S$300 room rate, and to ring-fence business events with bleisure (or blended travel).
“Singapore cannot find the solution overnight, and the strategy is how to make it practical, market-led and authentic.”
Meanwhile, Neeta Lachmandas, executive director, Institute of Service Excellence, Singapore Management University and former STB assistant chief executive, business development group, said the term “quality tourism” was coined around 2010, with the opening of the integrated resorts.
Agreeing “it is very important that quality tourism is reinforced”, she stressed the right perspective of what quality tourism is and how to create a customer experience that the visitor “feels is value” must be made clear to the industry.
Singapore, and industry members, needs to understand who the destination is going to appeal to, be “much more targeted” and “sharpen and refine marketing messages”.
Lachmandas gave the example of business events looking for “a certain quality, a certain brand – leveraging on the Singapore trademark – and are willing to pay.
“Delivering service excellence is complex and it has been reduced to a simplistic perspective – customer service,” she said, adding that every industry, not only tourism, needs to understand how to provide what the customer needs, pivot to the customer and be “customer obsessed”.
According to Lachmandas, customer satisfaction data shows Singapore “has done well” and “has improved”; still, organisations need “to reorganise and think very, very differently about customer journey mapping”.
Singapore also needs to understand “price versus value” and “the concept of value for the customer”, she highlighted.
STB’s Tan: Singapore cannot be a low-cost destination
“Technology is important but it cannot be the starting point and I advocate a chief customer officer in every company. This person (should) understand customer satisfaction research, what customer experience means, is data savvy, understands empathy and is designed-trained.”
Cinn Tan, chief commercial and marketing officer, Pan Pacific Hotels Group (PPHG), commented that Singapore could count on its highly educated and skilled workforce.
She pointed out Singapore is recognised as a global city and is deeply connected to the neighbouring region and many other parts of the world. Quoting STB, she said there were 180,000 visitors from Latin America and Africa in 2019.
Singapore as a quality tourism destination also has to focus on the continuous upgrade of its “lifestyle infrastructure”.
“Conscious travellers are a rapidly growing visitor segment,” PPHG’s Tan noted. “Singapore has a stronghold in urban greening with great potential to become a top sustainable urban destination and leader in environmentally friendly hospitality.”
Meeting planners and events are picking Singapore for its world-class facilities, international outlook and a business-friendly environment, she quipped.
She opined that Singapore can cater to “travellers looking to deviate from a standardised one-size-fits-all customer experience” towards more authentic, personalised journeys, noting that the industry is seeking to shift towards creating more opportunities for customisation and personal connections.
