The Covid-19 pandemic may have dealt Singapore’s tourism industry a tough hand, with tight travel curbs over the past two years, but one silver lining has emerged from the crisis that may yield long-lasting benefits.
In a bid to increase local patronage to tide through the travel slump, great strides have been made by travel and hospitality players towards innovation of their tourism products.
Tour operators have churned out creative offerings that provide unique, immersive and culturally-rich experiences. Think zipping around the city in a vintage Vespa sidecar to explore filming locations of the Crazy Rich Asians movie or visiting a traditional coffee roasting factory and watching craft masters work on paper making.
Local agency Tribe Tours gamified the tour experience in what it touts is the first-of-its-kind product in the local market with Chinatown Murders. The outdoor escape room game tour requires players to solve puzzles around the heritage district – an innovative tour format that has since been imitated by other operators.
Domestic response to the game tour has been “unexpectedly good”, according to founder Jason Loe, who attributed the warm reception likely to the SingapoRediscovers Vouchers scheme launched by the Singapore Tourism Board in December 2020 to stimulate domestic tourism in the absence of international travel.
The agency also hosts livestream tours, which pulls back the curtain on everything from food factories to disappearing trades in Singapore.
Loe told TTG Asia that they have been mulling over hybrid concepts and livestreaming tours even before the pandemic struck, but Covid-19 accelerated that pivot as “there was time to properly curate meaningful experiences and tap into new fields”.
Paranormal tours offered by Oriental Travel and Tours have also proved to be a hit among locals, which has led the operator to come up with more of such after-dark offerings, shared founder Stanley Foo.
The agency’s guided Creepy Tales of Singapore outing takes participants to spine-chilling locations such as the Bukit Brown Cemetery with over 100,000 tombs and a World War 2 battlefield to educate them on Singapore’s urban legends and history.
Meanwhile, hotels are also dialling up the novelty factor by offering experiential stay packages that allow guests to experience Singapore in unusual ways.
Raffles Hotel Singapore debuted its first-of-its-kind virtual interactive play, The Curious Case of the Missing Peranakan Treasure, set against the backdrop of the iconic grand dame. According to managing director, Christian Westbeld, the detective whodunit tale “exceeded expectations” and was “very well-received”, with guests “pleasantly surprised by this unexpected experience from a hotel”.
“We wanted to give guests the flexibility to enjoy this from the comfort of their homes wherever they are in the world or for local guests to experience the play in real life at the property itself – where the theatrical experience transcended the virtual realm in the form of a treasure hunt through exclusive daycation and staycation packages,” Westbeld explained.
Elsewhere, The Fullerton Hotel Singapore and The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore are luring guests with an array of unique experiences, including guided cultural tours around The Fullerton Heritage precinct, sustainability-themed tours at the Fullerton Farm where an array of fresh ingredients are grown, as well as culinary and cocktail-making workshops.
Singapore’s recent move to ease border controls with Vaccinated Travel Lanes (VTLs) forged with several countries signal a positive sign towards tourism recovery. As of end-December, the VTL scheme, which kicked off in September, allows quarantine-free travel for vaccinated travellers from 24 countries including the UK and the US.
Since news of the VTLs broke, The Fullerton Hotel Singapore and The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore have received enquiries and bookings from a mix of international travellers and Singaporeans who are returning primarily from the UK, the US and Australia, according to a spokesperson.
To cater to VTL travellers, both properties have rolled out the Experience Fullerton Hospitality package which includes daily breakfast for two, S$50 (US$37) dining credit and one-way limousine transfer for a minimum stay of three nights.
The package has seen “strong demand”, said the spokesperson, adding: “We expect many of these bookings to materialise in the first quarter of 2022, and we anticipate an uptick in bookings from VTL travellers as more VTLs are opened over the coming months.”
While the current spread of the new Omicron variant threatens to derail the muted inbound improvements, industry stakeholders remain cautiously optimistic on the country’s tourism outlook.
Loe reckoned: “We have built and cultivated a strong relationship with our local fans, so much so that they now look forward to our new tour launches. They have also become the ‘evangelists’ and word-of-mouth for Tribe’s experiences when their friends come back to Singapore.”
Association of Singapore Attractions’ chairman, Kevin Cheong, expressed hope that the creative, innovative and entrepreneurial spirit displayed by tourism businesses will prevail beyond this current period. “We must keep this spirit alive to continually reinvent ourselves, refresh our experiential offerings and most of all, rejuvenate our products,” he said.
Sarah Wan, general manager, Singapore, Klook observed that travellers worldwide are increasingly seeking more hyper-local and authentic experiences.
She said: “The efforts to innovate and deepen offerings will start to bear fruit once cross-border travel resumes, paving the way for a wider range of offerings for overseas travellers when they return. This is a perfect opportunity for Singapore to showcase a different side, beyond the urban environment.”
Meliá Chiang Mai, a 260-key hotel to soon debut in Thailand’s mountainous north, has embraced the farm-to-table social movement by establishing a farm to harvest produce for its restaurants, bars and spa.
The hotel, due to open on April 8 on Charoen Prathet Road in the heart of Chiang Mai, has partnered with ORI9IN The Gourmet Farm, a 80ha gourmet organic farm located in nearby San Sai District overseen by chef-turned-sustainable farmer James Noble and his wife May.
Noble, a Briton who has run Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK, will work with local farmers to grow an array of fruits, vegetables and herbs for the hotel on its own 0.8ha farm on the broader ORI9IN property.
In addition to local seasonal produce, the farm will also grow various kinds of tomatoes, salad leaves, and specialised ingredients that would otherwise need to be imported from Spain for the hotel’s authentic Mediterranean cuisine.
The partnership is a central plank of Meliá Chiang Mai’s 360° Cuisine programme, under which the hotel aims to work closely with local farmers to help them improve sustainability and encourage ethical production to make communities and the overall food system more resilient.
The 360° Cuisine programme not only gives guests peace of mind about where their food comes from but encourages them to visit the hotel’s farm to meet local farmers and learn more about sustainable farming and healthier eating.
The hotel’s menus will highlight appetisers, main courses and desserts that feature ingredients from the farm. Ingredients from the farm will also be in various beverages at the hotel’s bars and Meliá’s signature YHI Spa.
“In addition to pursuing ‘farm to plate’ by sourcing organic produce that travels only a short distance to our hotel, our partnership with ORI9IN also comprises ‘plate to farm’ where we separate our food waste and bring it back to the farm as compost, thus minimising waste as part of a truly 360-degree concept,” said Meliá Chiang Mai’s general manager Edward E. Snoeks.
The hotel will offer guests day trips to the farm that include a picnic lunch and a chance to learn more “about the journey their food and these products have made, as well as who has been a part of that journey”, said Noble.
“People often don’t know where food comes from, so we show them, albeit underscored by our passion for locally grown, sustainable ingredients,” he added. “This is also tourism that leaves no footprint on the land; we’re trying to show people that you can have a day out without harming what you came to see in the first place.”