Tourism (Attractions) Industry Digital Plan

Background

The attractions industry is a key pillar in the tourism sector driving economic growth, while also creating demand for other tourism-related industries such as accommodation, retail and dining. There are over 60 attractions in Singapore across Entertainment & Lifestyle, Nature & Parks, Adventure & Rides, and Museums & Heritage.

The attractions industry faces its own set of challenges such as rising competition, manpower constraints and fast changing travellers’ needs. To remain competitive, attractions need to innovate and transform by leveraging technology to streamline operations, improve productivity, enhance the visitor experience and deliver greater value.

Tourism Attractions Industry Digital Plan

The launch of the first Industry Digital Plan (IDP) for the Tourism (Attractions) industry comes on the back of a positive outlook for the global tourism sector, and a strong recovery in Singapore’s international visitor arrivals.

To date, over 20 IDPs have supported more than 90,000 businesses, which have benefitted from the SMEs Go Digital programme. To deepen digital capabilities at both the sector and enterprise levels and ensure that the IDPs continue to remain relevant to the needs of businesses, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) is working with the sector lead agencies to progressively refresh existing IDPs.

The Tourism (Attractions) IDP is jointly developed by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and IMDA, in consultation with the industry, as a guide for local attractions, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to uplift their digital capability as they embark on digital transformation efforts to drive growth.

The Tourism (Attractions) IDP serves as an easy-to-use, step-by-step guide on the digital solutions to adopt across three key job functions in the industry, namely customer service and engagement, sales and marketing, and sustainability. It adopts a persona approach which characterises attractions by their respective challenges and needs. This allows attractions to find the best fit solutions based on their focus areas.

Digital Solutions Roadmap

The Tourism (Attractions) IDP, together with the resources listed within, guides attractions in assessing their digital readiness and identifying digital solutions to adopt at different stages of growth. Attractions can adopt the digital solutions listed to address challenges such as management of customer queries and special requests, manual consolidation and tabulation of energy consumption and carbon emissions. The implementation of digital tools, which will include data protection features, also enables attractions to quickly derive data driven insights to enhance their sales and marketing strategies.

For example, iFly Singapore, an Adventure and Rides attraction, that has implemented self-service ticketing kiosks with facial recognition features to automate both their guest check-in process, as well as the search and payment process of photos and videos taken during the flight. Coupled with their CRM and video analytics system, iFly Singapore used data analytic tools to track and collate visitors’ data such as demographic profiles, footfall, and visit time. With data driven insights, they can now develop targeted sales strategies and marketing campaigns to increase their visitorship and raise average customer spend. In all, this also brought about 25% in time savings per day.

Another example is Kiztopia, an Entertainment and Lifestyle attraction that has adopted a Customer Relationship Management system that allows them to capture information on customers’ previous purchases, website visits, engagement with marketing emails and track sales opportunities (such as when celebrations like birthdays are coming up). This enables Kiztopia to use the data to develop targeted sales campaigns for their different customer segments, which resulted in 20-30% time savings per week.

AI in the Attractions Industry

The Tourism (Attractions) IDP incorporates the latest technological developments, including technologies such as AI and how it introduces new capabilities to many business solutions and enable attractions to transform and reap benefits. From personalised interactions using data analysis to efficient chatbots, AI can be infused in many business solutions to enhance processes, streamline workflows, and provide data-driven insights to improve decision making for attraction operators.

Roadmaps in the IDP to uplift Digital Capability

Additionally, there are two other roadmaps in the IDP for attractions to refer to. The Cybersecurity and Data Protection roadmap guides attractions on the cyber tools and data protection practices they could adopt to protect their business and customer data. The Digital Skills Training Roadmap serves as a guide to equip attractions’ employees with the necessary skills (including change management) to use digital tools in the workplace and tailor their training programmes according to employees’ needs.

Resources to support attractions in their digital journey

To complement the IDP, STB has also launched the Attractions Technology Roadmap, where attractions can deep dive into greater details of adopting the technology solutions in the IDP. This includes key features of the solutions, use cases and benefits, as well as key considerations for implementation. The roadmap also features case studies of the key learnings from local attractions who have adopted the solutions and tips for others looking to adopt the solutions.

There is also support for attractions to go digital such as IMDA’s CTO-as-a-Service. This one-stop platform allows attractions to self-assess their digital readiness through a digital health check and access market-proven digital solutions with grant support. Those that need more guidance can even engage digital consultants for customised digital advice and project management services to guide them in their digitalisation journey. First time usage of digital advisory and project management services is complimentary for eligible SMEs.

Lastly, to help the tourism sector, STB has partnered with IMDA’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) to bring the Tcube¹ Tech Directory to IMDA’s Discovery Engine². The collaboration provides an additional resource for tourism companies to widen their search for innovative tech vendors and solutions that can be found in and beyond the IDP, to address their business pain-points and challenge areas. This convenient platform has a wide range of solutions covering visitor experience, business productivity and sustainability. With this integration, it eases the vendor search process for all tourism industry players.

Visit go.gov.sg/CTOaaS-Tourism-IDP to download a copy of the Tourism (Attractions) IDP.

For more information on the Attractions Technology Roadmap, visit: https://www.stb.gov.sg/content/stb/en/industries/attractions.html.

For more information on Tcube initiatives, visit: https://www.stb.gov.sg/content/stb/en/trade-events-and-resources/Tcube.html.

To kickstart your innovation journey with tech solutions, visit: https://www.openinnovation.sg/find-solutions.