Singapore visitors up 13.7% in Q1

Singapore registered 2.9 million arrivals in the first quarter of the year.

Singapore.- The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) has reported that visitor arrivals reached 2.9 million in Q1, by 13.7 per cent on quarter-on-quarter terms. The figure represents a more than 1,000 per cent increase from Q1 2022 (246,000 arrivals) when travel remained heavily impacted by Covid-19 measures.

The visitor numbers for the first three months of 2023 represent about 62 per cent of the nearly 4.7 million arrivals recorded in the initial three months of 2019. Of the aggregate arrivals in the first quarter of the year, 2.2 million were overnight visitors, which was a 12.8 per cent increase from the final quarter of 2022. 

Singapore was one of the first countries in the region to relax Covid-19 measures. This approach resulted in a return of international tourists and an increase in play volume at the city’s two casino resorts: Resorts World Sentosa, operated by Genting Singapore; and Marina Bay Sands, run by a unit of Las Vegas Sands.

The largest component of international visitors to Singapore in the first three months of this year came from Indonesia, with almost 497,000 arrivals, followed by Malaysia, with approximately 259,000 arrivals. Almost 125,000 arrivals were from mainland China, which only began to ease travel restrictions in January of this year.

Keith Tan, the tourism board’s CEO, said in January that the STB expects international visitor arrivals to reach around 12 to 14 million visitors, bringing in approximately SGD18.00bn (US$13.62bn) to SGD21.00bn in tourism receipts – around two-thirds to three-quarters of the levels in 2019.