AUSTRALIA-SINGAPORE TRAVEL BUBBLE THE NEXT PRIORITY FOR TOURISM AND AVIATION

The Tourism & Transport Forum (TTF) said progress on the development of an Australia-Singapore Travel Bubble must remain front and centre of Australia’s recovery agenda after productive Prime Ministerial talks were held in Singapore yesterday.

TTF Chief Executive Margy Osmond said the message from Prime Minister Scott Morrison that the aim for Singapore to be the second country to open to quarantine-free travel to Australia, following the success of New Zealand, was exceptionally positive. Similar ambition came from Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong following the talks.

“TTF has long called for the reopening of international borders in a safe and responsible manner to enable international travel and tourism to start to recover from the estimated almost $4 billion in losses each and every month from the lack of international tourism spending in our cities and regions,” Margy Osmond said today.

“Pre-COVID, Singapore was one of Australia’s most important visitor growth markets, with some 417,000 visitors traveling to Australia over the course of 2019, growing by 14% or around 25,000 more visitors than the year before.

“These travellers stayed over 5.8 million nights and spent some $1.5 billion dollars across our visitor economy including on accommodation, in airports, at restaurants and cafes and on cultural, attraction and event related experiences.

“We know we can have these travellers back safely and responsibly and there is now a real opportunity to continue to build momentum from these recent talks to make this new travel bubble a reality.

“The next step is for government and industry to work together to develop a detailed roadmap covering all required details to make this ambition a reality. These could include the mutual recognition of health and vaccination certificates as well as any required benchmarks or targets like appropriate vaccination rates and the operational requirements of airlines and airports on both sides.

This Singapore roadmap must also feed into a wider framework to safely reopen Australia to the rest of the world in order to save remaining jobs and businesses and get the tourism and aviation economy back into action once more.”

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Contact: TTF Manager Policy, Media & Government Relations and Media Lindsay Hermes lhermes@ttf.org.au 0418 948 447