No, Indian tourists can’t replace Southeast Asia’s absent Chinese visitors – just look at Singapore

China was the largest source market for tourists to the region pre-pandemic, but Beijing’s zero-Covid policy has slowed the tourist tide to a trickle

Many Southeast Asian nations had hoped a post-pandemic surge of travellers from India would fill the gap – though tourism experts remain doubtful

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Tourists take a selfie in Singapore’s Merlion Park in January 2020. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:30am, 11 Sep 2022Updated: 9:24am, 29 Sep 2022

Since Singapore reopened its borders in April and started to allow vaccinated travellers back in, Stanley Foo, founder of tour operator Oriental Travel and Tours, said he had seen an “influx” of Indian tourists.

The city state has long recorded high numbers of visitors from India – 1.4 million came in 2019, according to the tourism board – making their return, in Foo’s words, “nothing extraordinary”.

What has changed is the number of Chinese tourists that Singapore has welcomed since the pandemic hit. Of the 1.5 million visitors recorded in the first half of this year, 282,000 were from Indonesia and 219,000 from India, but only around 17,000 came from China – a far cry from the 3.6 million Chinese nationals who visited the city state in 2019.

Tourists from China and elsewhere visit a temple in Chiang Rai, northern Thailand, before the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: AFP

And it’s not just Singapore. The absence of travellers from China – primarily due to Beijing’s strict zero-Covid policy and mostly closed borders – has been acutely felt across the region. Thailand has gone from welcoming more than 11 million Chinese tourists pre-pandemic to just a few thousand so far this year, and it’s a similar story in Indonesia where Chinese visitor arrivals have dropped from over 2 million in 2019 to around 20,000 this year.

To fill the gap, many Southeast Asian nations have pinned their hopes on a post-pandemic surge of travellers from India, but if Singapore can act as a barometer of the region’s thinking on the issue then this hoped-for tourist tide may never materialise.

Academics and tourism consultants who spoke to This Week In Asia agreed that while India is an increasingly important source market for inbound tourists to Southeast Asia, it cannot make up for the absence of visitors from China – at least in the short term.

This is despite the ramping up of efforts to draw Indian tourists to the region through campaigns, roadshows and promotions – like the “Enjoy Your Family Times Now in Singapore” campaign that offered families travelling from India between April and June discounts on plane tickets and popular attractions, drawing some 50,000 bookings at partner resorts such as Resorts World Sentosa and Gardens by the Bay.