The volume of International visitors to Singapore grew 4.9 percent year-on-year to 1.38 million in October. The growth has been driven by several sports events and meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE) that took place during the month, remarked Singapore Tourism Board (STB) in comments to GGRAsia.
Out of the 1.38 million visitor arrivals recorded in October, circa 74 percent – or 1.02 million – were overnight visitors, up 2.2 percent year-on-year, according to STB’s latest statistics. Average stay length of visitors has though declined by 3.1 percent year-on-year to 3.38 days in that month.
The visitor growth trend seen in October has been driven by a “robust pipeline of events”, remarked a STB spokesperson.
The October event lineup includes the annual motor racing gathering Formula 1 Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix 2025, golf event World Amateur Team Championship 2025, luxury goods festival UltraLuxe, as well as several MICE events – namely the Milken Institute Asia Summit, ITB Asia 2025, Singapore International Energy Week and ITMA Asia + CITME 2025, according to STB.
The top three feeder markets for Singapore’s international visitor arrivals in October were, respectively, China (226,000), Indonesia (177,200) and Australia (116,370).
Visitor arrivals from South Korea – albeit not amongst the top three feeder markets for the city-state – saw a “strong” performance in October, STB noted to GGRAsia. In that month, South Korea supplied 50,780 visitors.
“For the month of October, South Korea led growth among Singapore’s top 10 source markets with the highest year-on-year increase at 21 percent with [nearly] 51,000 visitors. This strong IVA [international visitor arrivals] performance coincided with an extended long weekend arising from major Korean public holidays – the mid-autumn harvest festival Chuseok and Hangeul Day,” the STB spokesperson additionally remarked.
The tourism board attributed the growth in South Korean visitor volume seen in October to travel promotions conducted in collaboration with online travel agents (OTA) and airlines targeted at their holiday period, as well as promotional efforts through partnerships with renowned K-pop artists.
The October tally took Singapore’s aggregate visitor volume of the first ten months of this year to 14.25 million, up by 2.5 percent year-on-year.
The city-state’s top three source markets for the January to October period remained as China (2.72 million), Indonesia (2.01 million) and Malaysia (1.04 million).
Of those top three markets, the visitor volume from China was only up by 0.4 percent year-on-year; those from Indonesia was down by 0.7 percent, while the cohort from Malaysia grew 6.5 percent year-on-year.
Nonetheless, the tourism board remarked that Singapore has a “continued appeal” to visitors from mainland China, with its diverse tourism offerings and reputation as “a convenient gateway to Southeast Asia”.
The tourism board also said it would continue to attract “quality visitors” from mainland China by developing “branded content partnerships”, and more efforts on social media marketing campaigns in collaboration with travel trade partners.
