Singapore sees rise of Chinese mainland visitors in Q1

SINGAPORE - Visitor arrivals from the Chinese mainland to Singapore grew 10 percent year-on-year to around 933,000 in the first quarter of 2018, ranking the first among Singapore's top 15 visitor-generating markets, according to the Tourism Sector Performance report released by the Singapore Tourism Board on Friday.

In the first three months, the Chinese mainland visitors spent about S$1.05 billion (about $0.77 billion), excluding expenditure on Sightseeing, Entertainment & Gaming, in Singapore, 1 percent less than that for the same period of last year.

Meanwhile, the total international visitor arrivals to Singapore grew 7.3 percent year-on-year to 4.6 million, and Singapore's total tourism receipts from them dropped 0.5 percent year-on-year to S$6.7 billion in total.

The report says following the Chinese mainland, Indonesia and India are the second and third largest visitor-generating markets respectively for Singapore. The number of visitors from the two countries grew 4 percent and 22 percent year on year in the first quarter, to 747,000 and 295,000, respectively.