Singapore Tourism Board has seen the growth of tourists arrival from China and United Kingdom, who are mainly the leisure tourists.
The tourists from China and United Kingdom are well in the higher spending on shopping. Those from the United States also registered a higher spend on shopping, but were mostly in Singapore for BTMICE. The countries had seen a decline in spending were Indonesia, India, and Japan.
STB’s chief executive, Mr Lionel Yeo said that the board was “pleased” to report a second consecutive year of record tourism performance and that it was the combined efforts of STB and its industry partners that yielded strong results, against a context of better-than-expected global economic recovery, continued growth in Asia-Pacific travel and increased flight and cruise connectivity to Singapore.
For the first three quarters of 2017, the tourism receipts excluding sightseeing, entertainment & gaming (TRexSEG) from the BTMICE industry grew by 4 per cent to S$3.15 billion compared to the same period in 2016. This was due to BTMICE visitors spending more on accommodation, shopping and other TR components, which helped offset the dip in BTMICE visitor arrivals.
The 2017 grew by 3.9 per cent to reach S$3.7 billion, while hotel occupancy rose by 1.5 percentage points.
There are twenty-two new hotels which opened, making the total number of hotels in Singapore 420 at the end of December 2017. This led to room supply expanding by 5 per cent to 67,084 rooms.
Singapore Tourism Board said it is “generally optimistic” about tourism prospects for 2018, which is forecasting the international visitor arrivals to be in somewhere between 17.6 to 18.1 million and tourism receipts to be in the range of S$27.1 to S$27.6 billion.
