Singapore to relax visa rules for Indians to hit its 1.5 mn tourist target, ET TravelWorld

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 then recovered to 1.1 million in 2023.

In 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.”

With 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.

The 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.

“We 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.”

New carriers are operating in India and once they start flying internationally, the number of tourists would increase, Poh added at a press conference.

The 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.

Singapore 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.

“We 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.

The 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.

Industry 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.