Singapore tourist arrivals slip in May, but remain at over a million

SINGAPORE’S international visitor arrivals exceeded a million in May for the third straight month, but slipped from April’s post-pandemic high.

Tourism arrivals slid to 1.11 million in May, down from 1.13 million recorded in the preceding month, based on the latest figures from the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) on Monday (Jun 12). But the month’s arrival numbers were more than 2.5 times the 418,458 visitors recorded in the corresponding month in 2022, even as arrivals remained below the 1.5 million visitors recorded in May 2019, before the pandemic.

May’s decline compared to April, a trend also observed in pre-pandemic 2017 to 2019, could be due to seasonal effects, said Cushman & Wakefield head of research Wong Xian Yang, who added that visitor arrivals in May were possibly the result of “dissipated post-public holiday travel demand” from key source countries.