Technology and Singaporeans key in consolidating Republic’s tourism sector

Tourism development in Singapore has come a long way, with the sector seeing particularly strong growth in the last decade.

In 2008, 10.1 million tourists visited Singapore.

By 2017, this has shot up to a record-breaking 17.4 million, with the visitors contributing tourism receipts of S$26.8 billion.

The government and particularly the Singapore Tourism Board can claim much credit for creating, reinventing and reshaping our landscape with bold projects like the integrated resorts, Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa, as well as Gardens by the Bay.

Such large-scale infrastructural projects, coupled with an events calendar now filled to the brim with something exciting happening in Singapore almost every weekend - be it the F1 races, carnivals or fairs at Bayfront, or marathons and races with our beautiful cityscape as the backdrop - have all been very effective in branding Singapore as an attractive tourism destination.

What next then?

There are still several big projects in the pipeline. The Mandai nature precinct is currently being developed to create an eco tourism destination, while new development plans are also in the works for Sentosa and Pulau Brani as well as Orchard Road.

But how many more such projects can Singapore afford to pursue in our small island city-state?

To consolidate our success in branding Singapore as a highly attractive tourism destination, it is time to move away from expecting new and bigger redevelopment projects for tourism every few years.

Today’s social media savvy tourist may indeed be looking to visit somewhere that is spectacular and Instagram-worthy, but this is often coupled with a desire to have a tourism experience that is personalised and nuanced – something that is different from what the next tourist might conscientiously repeat.

The government’s usage of technology such as the Singapore Tourism Analytics Network (Stan) to understand tourism data and trends therefore need to done with a conscious effort to avoid the aggregating lure of statistics.

Each and every visitor is an individual with his or her own unique life stories that perhaps can be told (in part) through his or her tourism experiences in Singapore.

In that light, Artificial Intelligence related technologies, when appropriately developed and integrated with tourism, can be very useful in creating and curating personalised experiences.

Many museums in the world have built and made good use of mobile apps to that now replaces traditional audio guides and augments the visitor experience with a layer of dynamism.

Can we similarly reimagine a tourism experience across our city imbued with AI technologies? Indeed, tour itinerary planning and tour guiding can and is undergoing a revolutionary turn where AI and real-time monitoring can be used to facilitate and shift tourists across different attractions, shopping and F&B outlets across the city.

In China, Alibaba and its online travel platform, Fliggy, has long been capitalising on machine learning by training data around their massive user base.

Purchases not necessarily related to tourism on Alibaba is captured to understand the consumer – much as how what we post on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram enters into their algorithms that learn much more about us as individuals than we perhaps realise.

Using such deep learning of each individual consumer’s preferences and purchasing patterns, AI is hence able to provide tour suggestions customised to an individual, and shift away from broad-based marketing that assumes that all tourists desire to do and look at the same things in their travels.

In another example, Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, a smart-voice controlled speaker like Amazon Echo, has been introduced into hotel rooms in Hainan.

It features a memory function that recalls each users’ preferences for lighting, air conditioning and other ambient settings in a hotel room.

When one next books a hotel room with Fliggy at a place where Tmall Genie is available, one enters the hotel room set to the preferences it recalls.

Such technologies offer immense potential to the redevelopment of tourism in Singapore, even as critical issues of privacy and security needs to be addressed.

In growing our tourism numbers, it is also vital to look at a yet untapped market - local residents in Singapore.

While “domestic tourism” seems odd as a concept for a country as small as ours, the potential is tremendous.

In 2017, Singstat recorded almost 10 million outbound departures of Singapore residents. The United Nations’ World Tourism Organisation documents Singapore’s outbound tourism expenditure to be S$30.4 billion in 2016. This exceeds Singapore’s inbound tourism expenditure of S$26.8 billion in 2017.

While our tourism attractions now mostly also cater to residents, can more be done to actively entice residents to stay within our borders instead of spending overseas?

Indeed, the need to up the game in retaining residents to pursue touristy leisure within Singapore is not just about increasing visitor numbers or profits.

2018 has been declared as the year of climate action in Singapore - shouldn’t our tourism industry be a part of this? Studies have now established that global tourism produces about 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with flights being amongst the most significant contributors. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report also warns of the dire need to cap global warming to 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial levels that will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. Instead of focusing only on mitigation methods for climate change adaptation, it has become increasingly critical to reimagine our production and consumption habits. The reinvention of our tourism spaces hence need to address such issues, and if to begin with, Singapore residents can be convinced to spend more of their holidays within our borders, we will immediately be reducing our carbon footprint.

And perhaps when we consider what new directions tourism in Singapore should take, we need to bear our carbon footprint in mind. Reinventing tourism in Singapore do not and should not always be about building yet another newer and bigger attraction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sin Harng Luh is assistant professor at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Geography. Her research focuses on tourism and tourism’s practices within the boundaries of sustainable development and ethical consumerism.