After more than a decade of showing visitors around Singapore, this tourist guide wants to offer more innovative and immersive tours as the director of Xperience Singapore Events & Travel DMC
You started in hospitality and eventually joined tourism. What drew you to this field?
I felt like I had found my calling to showcase Singapore to the rest of the world.
From groups, I branched out to private tours, and all these experiences helped me realise that there are many other things we can do to sell the country as a destination, but they’re not being done yet. There’s a lot of focus on man-made attractions, but the soft (experience) is not there.
I wanted to show another side of Singapore that a lot of travellers and incentive visitors have not seen.
What sort of soft experiences?
A lot of our special interest groups or cultural troupes have done tours for locals before, but not tourists. They don’t know who to approach or how to go about it.
Activities like learning and performing the Chinese lion dance, and rowing across Marina Reservoir on dragonboat can be done not just for travellers, but for conferences, events and teambuilding attendees.
In fact, the dragonboat racing group had approached a travel agent for a partnership in the past, but was turned down.
We would like to promote this to event planners so that they know there’s something different they can do here in Singapore.
What are you anticipating most in your new DMC role?
This is a new direction for me, so I’m looking forward to how we can make the company different, and become successful among the many players in the market.
