COVID has dealt a heavy blow to Singapore’s tourism industry, which saw international visitor arrivals plummet by 85% in the past 18 months – from more than 19 million to 2.7 million.
“It’s been really difficult and hard,” was how Lynette Pang, assistant chief executive, marketing group, Singapore Tourism Board (STB) described this period, which has led to a change in mindset – “to discard or put aside the quest for perfection” and instead be fast, quick and agile.
Speaking at the final episode of the WiT Travel Roadshow, she said, “In big organisations like the STB, getting things done perfectly is critical, so that was a tough paradigm to let go and to go for speed versus perfection.”
STB has to look inwards to the domestic market to keep the industry afloat, as well as to support the local industry. To prop up the market, STB, alongside Enterprise Singapore and Sentosa Development Corporation, pumped S$45 million into the SingapoRediscovers campaign to get locals to travel at home. The domestic campaign, launched in July last year, was a bid to “capture a sliver” of the S$34 billion that Singaporeans spent on overseas trips in 2018.
Pang said: “There were a couple of things we really focused on. One was really about rediscovering things that Singaporeans might not have seen before in Singapore. Generally they are very well travelled, and there were many things about their own backyard that they’ve not been to. And it was also about exploring beyond the city centre, to explore the greater Singapore and the smaller precincts.”
In discussions with some of its online travel partners, it also unearthed an emerging trend among Singaporeans to explore smaller islands within the vicinity of the city state, which was not something they did pre-pandemic.
“I sincerely hope that Singaporeans, in discovering Singapore, have fallen in love all over again with the country. And when borders reopen, they will talk about this to the world,” said Pang.
Meanwhile, with Singapore having crossed the 80% Covid-19 vaccination milestone, the city state is slowly moving ahead with reopening with the launch of quarantine-free travel lanes for vaccinated passengers from Germany and Brunei Darussalam from September 8. Fully vaccinated residents can travel to Germany and back without having to serve stay-home notice (SHN); they just need to undergo four Covid-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
On how STB would market to travellers from Germany differently now versus before, Pang said it would be working with intermediaries on “full funnel marketing, from branding and awareness all the way to bookings.”
These will also be key shifts in STB’s marketing as more markets open up – from building brand awareness, changing perceptions, driving consideration, as well as carrying out research on booking trends.
“In the past one -and-a-half year, it’s really been about keeping the destination top of mind. The switch now, as more markets open, would be on how we can work more with travel intermediaries and with airlines to drive consumers down the funnel to do bookings,” said Pang.
Two trends, which have accelerated during Covid, that will influence destination marketing are “more bespoke, smaller and personalised” campaigns as well as sustainability, which is “definitely an area that Singapore has always believed in. We are a green city, we have a green plan and, from a tourism board perspective, this is an area that we’re working very carefully on. We’re going to be investing significantly in this area.”
Singapore is also reimagining and reinventing its offerings in anticipation of the new type of traveller post-pandemic. At a hybrid event in late November last year, STB unveiled SingapoReimagine, the banner platform for initiatives that are meant to “shape the future of [the tourism] sector”.
“It’s something that we as a country with very few resources has been called upon to be who we are … many stakeholders had to really reimagine what their business model can be, how the workforce can look like, what’s the experience they can deliver.
“Moving ahead is this power of Singaporeans to really rethink paradigms, whether it’s in terms of experience, in terms of adopting a new way of sustainable practices and tourism or how can they use technology to deliver, not just back of house but also front of house experiences. Those are areas that I think we’ll be investing significantly in to really differentiate Singapore.”
Pang described it as “very exciting” and “fun” selling Singapore in a hybrid environment, combining the physical with the virtual while waiting for the pandemic to go away. Technology has made this possible, she added, opening upopportunities for Singapore as well as every destination across the world. “These days, with technology we have been able to speak to the world. … We can bring Singapore across the world.”
Asked to name one destination that has done a good job in making her yearn to travel there, Pang picked Italy. “The product, the culture, the art, the people, the food – all amazing.”
And one piece of advice she would like to give travel marketers in Singapore and elsewhere about destination marketing right now: “Be true to yourself and be fast.”
Watch the full interview with Lynette Pang in the video below.
• Featured image credit: Cristian Andriana/Getty Images