A Museum of Ice Cream is going to open in Singapore in August 2021 while the Minister for Trade and Industry laid out how the future of the tourism industry would look like in Singapore.
A museum built for selfies
Singapore will have 3 new touristic attractions, the Singapore Tourism Board announced during an annual industry conference on April 7.
Despite the period of international travel restrictions, the Museum of Ice Cream will open its doors in August 2021. This American concept, which was first a pop-up store in 2016 before turning into a permanent installation in New York City, will be the first one outside of the U.S.
The museum, in which a multi-sensory installation would be featured, is more about entertainment than culture. It is often an opportunity for taking selfies in a shinny and colorful infrastructure, and posting a picture next to a rainbow sprinkle pool on Instagram.
As the Museum of Ice Cream’s website explains, they believe in “creating beautiful and shareable environments that foster IRL (In Real Life) interaction and URL connections”.
4 touristic attractions in the works
A thrill-ride concept, a kind of human catapult said to be the tallest in Asia, will also open at the end of 2021. An air-panoramic attraction where people can enjoy a drink 35 meters above ground with a 360-degree view experience will be available to tourists next year.
These projects come in the middle of a tourism crisis fostered by travel restrictions.
Singapore went from welcoming 18 million tourists in 2018, 3 times its population size, to fewer than 1,000 tourists in April or May 2020.
As a consequence, the Singapore Tourism Board had invested in a marketing campaign promoting “Singapoliday”, encouraging Singaporians to enjoy local tourism.
To increase Singapore’s tourism attractiveness, the Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing laid out the country’s vision about the tourism industry in a post-pandemic era, in which nearly “everything became remote”.
“It’s one thing to travel around the world to listen to presentations that you could have listened to from home via Zoom, but it’s another thing to travel to an event to exchange ideas and knowledge that can in turn produce new ideas, products, and knowledge,” the Minister added at the annual tourism industry conference according to Channel News Asia.
Singapore tourism will rely on the intangible experiences
The country’s value proposition, limited by the scarcity of natural landscape, therefore lies in “the intangibles”. In other words, with the increase of digitization, Singapore sees the future of tourism even more as an experience than it used to be.
As such, Singapore wants to welcome “new products and new experiences, enabling businesses from around the world to launch first-to-market solutions and innovations”.
For instance, there is a plan to test-bed new concepts as part of a new attraction in a vacant site.
So in order to increase Singapore’s tourism attractiveness, the Museum of Ice Cream appears to be seen as the new experience serving “the intangibles”.
Media sources and useful links:
- Tourism spending down 39% to S$4 billion as visitor numbers to Singapore plunge in Q1: STB, Channel news asia, July 2020, Free access
- About us, Museum of Ice Cream
- S’pore to get 4 new attractions including Museum of Ice Cream and Sentosa rotating gondola, The Straits Time, April 2021, Free access
- Shifts in technology, sustainability present opportunities for tourism sector in the long run: Chan Chun Sing, Channel news asia, April 2021, Free access
