Travel Briefs

Singapore invests in resort

Singapore will build its first ever waterfront resort hotel with sweeping ocean views as part of an ambitious plan to attract high-spending tourists to the city-state, the developer said yesterday.

The proposed 320-room five star waterfront hotel on Sentosa island is to be located in the prime Quayside Collection project being planned for the island south of mainland Singapore, Sentosa Leisure Group said. Darrell Metzger, chief executive of Sentosa Leisure Group, said the hotel project is pitched mainly at well-heeled visitors who are willing to spend.

"It will definitely be a very nice five star international brand," Metzger said.

"When they come to Singapore, they like that kind of lifestyle, this is where we want them to stay," he said. Guests at the hotel will enjoy sweeping vistas of a marina lined with luxury yachts, waterfront retail shops and restaurants, all of which are part of the project. Two six-storey condominiums will also be built.

Sentosa island is in the midst of a 10-year rejuvenation plan worth US$6.1

billion aimed at sprucing up its attractions to draw more visitors. It has been earmarked as the site of one of Singapore's two casino projects. A record 5.1 million visitors visited Sentosa, which boasts of an underwater aquarium, man-made beaches and other attractions, in the year to March last year, the developer said.

Asia becomes a holiday hit

Travel bookings in Asia hit a record last year with more than 54.3 million reservations made, an increase of 6 percent over the previous year, a leading industry operator said last week.

For this year, regional bookings are projected to grow by 4 percent to 6 percent but the state of the global economy looms as the industry's main concern, Abacus International said.

"I think the biggest threat is actually economic, that we see a slowdown ... and all the consequences of that," said Don Birch, president and chief executive of Abacus, the region's leading ticket reservation firm.

With the winter season ending soon, the threat of a bird flu outbreak has also eased, Birch said.

Looking back on last year, the industry has once again demonstrated its resi-lience with the 6 percent rise in bookings despite spiralling oil prices and the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami that is believed to have killed more than 220,000 people in several Asian nations, Abacus said.

"The real story is that the travel industry has grown remarkably in the face of all these things," Birch said.

"Although some regions saw tourism numbers dropping in the aftermath of the tsunami, most travellers opted to visit a different area of Asia Pacific in the meantime while the clean-up and rebuilding were occurring," he said.

A `hermit kingdom' no more

For the first time, more than 10 million South Koreans traveled abroad last year while inbound tourism to the former "hermit kingdom" surpassed 6 million, the Pacific Asia Travel Association said Thursday.

"The [South] Korean outbound tourism miracle has been the product of

dramatic and, at the time, painful structural reform in the economy following financial collapse in 1997 to 1998," said the association's director of strategic intelligence, John Koldowski.

"Over time, as the [South] Korean people's spending power strengthened, so did their resolve to spend it on overseas experiences, especially in Asia," Koldowski said.

Statistics compiled by the association's Bangkok office showed that the most popular destinations for South Koreans were Asia (72.6 percent), the Americas (8.1 percent), Europe (5.8 percent) and the Pacific (4.5 percent).

Last year, 2.96 million and 1.74 million South Koreans visited China and Japan, respectively.

In Europe, Germany and the United Kingdom were the first and second most popular destinations with 141,606 and 111,845 arrivals, respectively, the association said.

South Korea's inbound tourism sector was also on the rise with 6.02 million arrivals in 2005, up 3.5 per cent on 2004 and passing the 6 million mark for the first time.

EU wants an end to US discrimination

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso called on the US government last week to end its travel restrictions on citizens from 10 EU member states, warning the restrictions could damage trade ties. In a speech at the University of Pittsburgh, the EU chief said Washington had to ``end this situation of discrimination against the new member states.'' A text of the speech was released by the EU in Brussels.

For three years, EU officials have backed calls from the 10 new members that they be included in the US visa waiver program, which would allow their citizens to visit the US for three months without a visa. The 10 new members -- mostly eastern European countries plus Malta and Cyprus -- joined the bloc in 2004.

Only Slovenia enjoys benefits under the visa-waiver scheme. The US says the other nine new EU members failed to meet all US criteria for joining the program, including a 3 percent threshold for rejected visa applicants. Barroso said, however, that the restrictions would damage business.