Picture : Twitter/ ANI
Singapore is set to report its best year for tourism since the COVID-19 pandemic shut the travel sector down with help from visitors from Indonesia, India, Malaysia and Australia. Based on data from the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) till November, these four countries together account for almost half (48 per cent) of the total arrivals to the small island state.
As per ANI report, As of November, the number of foreign arrivals in Singapore reached 5.37 million. In July this year, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) said that Singapore expected to receive between 4 and 6 million visitors in 2022. The number of visitors for October and November was both around 816,000. With December traditionally a busy travel period for visitors to Singapore, this figure is expected to be maintained and arrivals are projected to reach around 6.2 million.
A major contributor to this is residents of India who make up the second largest group of visitors to Singapore with a total of 612,300 visitors up to November 2022. They also stay the longest with an average length of stay of 8.61 days compared with an average of 5.19 days. For comparison, Indonesians on average stayed 4.66 days, Malaysians for 4.28 days and Australians for 4.05 days.
With 986,900 visitors up till November, Indonesia is the largest source of foreign visitors to Singapore. Malaysia is in third place with 495,470, followed by Australia (476,480) and the Philippines (325,480).
These numbers are still a far cry from Singapore’s heyday as the fifth most visited city in the world in the last pre-COVID year of 2019 when it received over 19.1 million visitors. During that year, Singapore had over 3.6 million visitors from China, then Singapore’s largest tourism source.
