Rethinking tourism.

The constantly-evolving global tourism demands, competitive tourism environment and economic challenges make it imperative to review Singapore’s tourism sector from time to time. This study represents an attempt to better align existing tourism policies with the new challenges in our external environment for three emerging tourism trends, namely healthcare, education and ecological tourism. In order to achieve the research objectives, we sought experts’ opinions on the impact of the economic crisis on Singapore's tourism scene and subsequently used the findings as input for the experience surveys across the three tourism trends. The objective was to sieve out issues that the tourism industry players are facing. Together with studies on the impact of the 2008 global economic crisis and competitive developments in the tourism industry, we discovered some critical but less known issues that the industry players were facing. Across the three trends, it was found that they were largely resilient to the impacts of the global economic downturn. Eventually, we analyzed all the findings and drew lessons from other countries to construct practical recommendations for the various stakeholders.BUSINES