Flights nearly back on track, pre-Covid tourist arrivals in 2024: S’pore tourism

Pune: The India and Middle-East head of the Singapore Tourism Board, Renji Wong, said at a travel trade roadshow in Pune that as many as 2.19 lakh tourists from India visited Singapore in the first half of 2022, now the second-biggest contributor of tourists to his country, adding that peak pre-pandemic tourist arrivals are not expected till 2024.
“In 2019, we received 1.41 million tourists from India. And in the first half of this year alone, there were 1.5 million global visitors in Singapore, of which 2.19 lakh were from India. Indians are hungry to travel, and the recovery in travel has been seen across all Indian regions. However, we expect recovery to pre-pandemic tourist numbers by 2024,” Wong said, in a briefing.
Wong also added that Singapore’s airport has been re-connected with 14 of the 15 cities in India that it was connected to pre-pandemic. While Pune is not connected to Singapore by air, Wong added, “We are always talking to the airlines”.