Tourism sector needs to move towards quality

S'pore tourism sector needs to move towards quality

Singapore's tourism industry should move away from quantity to quality if it is to overcome the long-term challenges posed by regional competition and land and labour constraints.

Speaking at a tourism conference, Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry, S Iswaran suggested three strategic thrusts - Innovation, Integration and Productivity.

Mr Iswaran said: "We must focus on and reinforce our comparative advantages and move away from sheer quantity and in turn focusing on yield and value capture as a norm for our tourism sector.

"In other words, emphasis on yield, on the value for the customer and what kind of value add we can generate rather than sheer number increase. To raise our game, we need to focus on three aspects, innovation, integration and productivity."

With innovative ideas, an integrated approach within the industry and greater productivity, Mr Iswaran is confident Singapore can ride on Asia's momentum and position itself for the next phase of growth.

He said Singapore should be on track to achieve the forecast of between 12 to 13 million visitor arrivals and S$22 to S$24 billion in tourism receipts in this year.

Separately, The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) said there is still momentum for growth amid uncertainties such as the events in the Middle East and Japan.

Japan is among the top ten tourist markets for Singapore. In January, there were 49,000 visitors from Japan but this is likely to slow.

Already, SIA said it is cutting back on flights to and from Tokyo's Haneda Airport because of weakening demand. Tour agencies too have reported cancellations of tours to Japan.

STB chief executive officer Aw Kah Peng said: "We believe that there will be an impact. How large that impact will be, we cannot be certain at this point but certainly our hearts are with them...as far as we are concerned, these are markets that are important to us and we will continue to be there."

She said this while addressing some 500 industry players at the annual tourism industry conference.

She added that value creation will drive further growth.

STB and the Singapore Hotel Association have formulated a hotel productivity plan which aims to increase customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Ms Aw said: "Each company will take a different approach, we will work with them, ways to support them. There are a couple of key elements, so one of them is training. How do we support industry partners when they commit to training their people. So that's one very core area. Two is how to we support as they look into their own internal processes, whether it is the organisation, the redesigning of jobs, the improvement of technology, so how can we support them.

"Third thing, is how do we track the improvements. STB is looking at a way to work with the hotel sector, get them to collectively agree to a set of measures that can be quantified that can be tracked and then we find a way to publish that report so that we can all keep track of all these happenings."

The formulation of such productivity plans will be extended to other tourism-related sectors in the near future.

At the conference, STB also revealed plans for a mobile information guide called YourSingapore, which will be launched in May. The application aims to deepen the engagement with visitors to Singapore. There will be no data charges imposed on visitors when using the application.

-News courtesy of Channel Newsasia-