Singapore, 21 Mar (PTI): Expecting over 1.5 million Indian tourists this year, Singapore is focusing on increasing its hospitality infrastructure such as hotel rooms, and working on seamless and easy visas for them, a senior tourism official said on Wednesday.
\nBefore the pandemic-induced lockdown, Singapore had received 1.4 million tourists from India in 2019, which then recovered to 1.1 million in 2023.
\nIn 2024, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) expects the number to go past the 2019 strength even as it acknowledged the potential of getting over 1.5 million visitors though it has not set any target given the huge tourism potential of the Indian market.
\nWith three offices in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, the STB is working on getting seamless and easy visas for Indian tourists, Poh Chi Chuan, executive director of Exhibition & Conference at the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) told PTI.
\nThe island state is building infrastructure for tourists and business travellers, such as 9,000 new hotel rooms that are being added to about 72,000 existing rooms.
\nWe need visitors to come and fill these rooms, Poh underlined and hoped The flights between India and Singapore get back to the pre-pandemic level.
\nNew carriers are operating in India and once they start flying internationally, the number of tourists would increase, Poh added at a press conference.
\nThe press conference was held to announce the inaugural APAC edition of the world-renowned National Retail Federation (NRF) Retail Big Show to be held here on June 11-13, six months after NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show in New York City.
\nSingapore is just not looking at the tourist traffic out of India but also business travellers given that both countries have growing trade and a prospering Indian economy, he said.
\nWe also see a lot of opportunities coming up in India in sectors such as pharma, BioMed, IT and FinTech. These are very strong industries for Singapore to increase bilateral trade, said Poh, adding that Singapore has large-scale exhibitions and conferences catering to these sectors covering advanced technologies.
\nThe APAC edition of NRF is expecting between five per cent to 10 per cent of delegates for its 5,000-participant strong Singapore show in June, said Ryf Quail, managing director of the global retail event that is held annually in New York.
\nIndustry stalwarts addressing the mega gathering include Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO, the Retailers Association of India, Shireesh Joshi, Chief Business Officer, The Open Network for Digital Commerce, and Mathsy Kutty, APAC Leader, The Climate Pledge, Amazon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Singapore, 21 Mar (PTI): Expecting over 1.5 million Indian tourists this year, Singapore is focusing on increasing its hospitality infrastructure such as hotel rooms, and working on seamless and easy visas for them, a senior tourism official said on Wednesday. Before the pandemic-induced lockdown, Singapore had received 1.4 million tourists from India in 2019, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-237417","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-national"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}