Sentosa sees 30% surge in visitors

Sentosa sees surge of 30% in visitors with record numbers on some days

Sentosa is seeing a surge in visitors. From February to April this year, it had an increase of over 30 per cent in visitors compared with the same period last year.

It also had record numbers on certain days.

Sentosa is riding on new attractions such as Universal Studios Singapore and Resorts World Sentosa.

Longtime attractions and house staples managed by Sentosa Leisure Group like the Merlion and the Images of Singapore are enjoying renewed interest, drawing 26 per cent more visitors between February and April.

One visitor said: "It is a very nice place to visit because it is almost complete all the entertainment"

Sentosa said the good performance can also be attributed to the turnaround in the economy and it said that within the next five years, it's projecting guest arrivals to more than double than the current six million visitors it's seeing in the past two years.

A crowd size of up to 20,000 was previously seen on only a weekend but it's now typical on a weekday.

Rajavarman M, assistant manager, Admission Operations, Operations and Retail Division, said: "During a weekday, we see a weekend crowd before RWS has opened and on a weekend we are seeing a slightly more peak crowd that we used to see during certain public holidays. And during our current public holidays, we see an almost super peak crowd, like during Chinese New Year - we almost hit a 100,000 crowd which we have never seen before".

Manpower and resources have been stepped up by up to 50 per cent to manage the crowds.

Mr Rajavarman added: “We have got queue management plans and increased our trains. We see and study the traffic patterns and we increase the trains and buses accordingly like on a weekday.

“We have seven buses running last time but now we have got 14 buses. On a weekend, we increase to 21 buses. For the deployment for manpower and all that, we increase by 50 per cent.”

-News courtesy of Channel Newsasia-