International
The Lion's Roaring
Big game-sized changes enhance Singapore's meeting and incentive appeal.
By Anne Marie D. Lee
July 14, 2010
New Singapore
By Donna Airoldi
Nearly five years after the Singapore government announced that it was relaxing its ban on casinos and had approved two massive developments—featuring several hotels, meeting spaces, and entertainment venues along with casinos, to the tune of about $10 billion combined—Phase I of the projects are finally debuting this year.
The casino resorts aren't the only new draws in town though. As I discovered on a recent visit, Singapore has been busy adding plenty of cool experiences, cultural institutions, and special events to its offerings the past two years, giving planners plenty of reasons to take a new look at the Lion City. Here are some highlights.
Mega Resorts
The integrated resorts, as they've been dubbed by the local tourism community, were green-lighted as a means to increase meeting and convention business, along with tourism. Projections anticipate 17 million new visitors in five years. To appease concerns about legalizing gambling in Singapore, the government required that the casinos take up no more than 5 percent of each of the projects' total space, so gaming will be less of a focus than it is in casino resorts elsewhere.
The luxurious Marina Bay Sands project held its grand opening celebration just last month. The resort features 2,600 hotel rooms, a four-floor casino, 1.3 million square feet and 250 rooms of meeting and convention space—which can accommodate up to 45,000 delegates and includes Asia's largest and column-free ballroom for up to 6,600 banquet guests.
Also part of the grand opening is the spectacular cantilevered Sky Park, complete with infinity pools, spa, gardens, and spectacular views; the remaining meeting space; and more dining and shopping venues; six celebrity-chef restaurants; luxury shops from Chanel to Louis Vuitton located in one of two "floating Crystal Pavilions"; two 2,000-seat stages, one of which will debut The Lion King in fall 2010; and an arts and science museum.
The more family-friendly Resorts World Sentosa has been opening in phases since January. The project comprises four hotels—Festive Hotel, Hard Rock Hotel Singapore, Crockfords Tower, and Hotel Michael—offering a combined inventory of 1,350 rooms and 10 restaurant outlets at their opening. Another two hotels at the resort, Equarius Hotel and Spa Villas, will add another 500 rooms when they launch after 2010. The Spa Villas will feature beach bungalows, and the Equarius Hotel will offer a rainforest- theme.
Entertainment options will include an ESPA spa, plenty of restaurants and retail stores, and four theme parks: Equarius Water Park, Marine Life Park—which will be seven times the size of the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta when completed—Maritime Xperiential Museum, and Universal Studios Singapore, with world premieres of Madagascar- and Transformersthemed attractions. The resort's Crane Dance will be a nightly multimedia event, with lights, lasers, sound, and pyrotechnic displays.
Extensive meeting and convention space will accommodate up to 35,000 guests in 91,275 square feet of convention space; a staged hall with seating for 1,600 guests; a column-free, 20,000-square-foot ballroom, 46 meeting and event rooms; and 15 outdoor spaces. In addition, several venues within the theme parks and attractions can be reserved for private incentive or meeting groups, ranging from 180 to 3,500 attendees. About 30 MICE events have already been booked for the facilities.
As with the rest of Singapore, which is undergoing fast and furious development driven by multibillion-dollar investments in its tourism infrastructure, the EXPO also has some developments underway, the biggest being the addition of a Meeting Annex, ready by the end of 2011, that will include a suite of new meeting rooms equipped with speakers and retractable screens and acoustically treated walls. Says Expo CEO, Aloysius Arlando, "More venues are set to emerge in Asia and organizers are planning multi-faceted business events more than ever, compared to pure conferences or exhibitions in the past… We intend to keep up with this pace, constantly reviewing what we can offer our customers and adding value to their events through the provision of event creation advice and incentive schemes."
New Hotels, Spas, and Restaurants
Singapore's hotel scene has seen a burst of energy the past two years, especially with the opening of the ultra-luxurious St. Regis hotel, and lush resortlike Capella on nearby Sentosa island, each with top-notch spas and restaurants to match. Singapore's dining scene has reached new levels too, with award-winning chefs from around the world moving to the city-state and creating a vibrant culinary community, with the Tippling Point, Fifty Three, and White Rabbit, to name a few.
Future Projects
Singapore's waterfront master plan includes Gardens by the Bay, three new gardens for Marina Bay opening in late 2010 or early 2011, adding to Singapore's already renowned Botanical Gardens for flora-loving visitors. Features include a second botanical garden, giant solar "supertrees" and tree-like structures for cooling, walkways in the sky, and a conservatory. A new International Cruise Terminal is being built in Marina South. When it opens in late 2011, it will be able to handle double the city's current cruise capacity.For Westerners traveling to Singapore, the only encumbrance one might experience in this stately, flower-patched, equatorial nation is not language or culture but humidity. Located just north of the equator, it bears a hot climate that takes some getting used to. That challenge aside, most everything else in the Lion City, as it's called, functions in a smooth and orderly fashion. Renowned for its clean streets, low-crime, and food-centric culture, Singapore offers a halcyon environment in a strategic location for expanding business to Asia, which in this downtrodden economy happens to be where the markets are. And, as indicated by the vigorous development of Vegas-scale projects, including restaurants from culinary titans Daniel Boulud, Mario Batali, and Wolfgang Puck, Singapore has only just begun to show the world what it has to offer as a travel destination.
Exploring the many sights to see in Singapore, you quickly discover that the heart and soul of this nation are the hawker markets: tiered, open-aired food centers where innumerable food stalls are clustered together, bringing an exotic panoply of Singaporean street food into one hygienic, food-court setting. At the Chinatown Complex, a popular food center in Singapore's Chinatown district, we sat down at a table on the open-air terrace as a variety of fried foods were brought to us by our tour guide, Andrew Ong, who is as indefatigable as he is informative. Setting down the small baskets of fried snacks, he then called over a waitress, addressed as xiaojie (see-ow di-ehh), the Mandarin Chinese word for "Miss," and ordered beers. The crispy vegetarian rolls I sampled were worlds apart from the oil-soaked cigarellos you find at Asian restaurants at home. These had a non-greasy crunch and a sweet, savory cohesion of flavors that instantly befriended you. But, as with any fried food, the real magic happened when cold beer arrived, which in this case were large bottles of Tiger Beer in a bucket filled with ice.
We sipped our beer, drank in our surroundings, and soon felt the joyful pull of languor. Just like that, a busy morning transformed into a lazy afternoon. The next day we enjoyed similar downtime at the Geylang Serai Market and Food Centre, this time sharing traditional Asian desserts like onde onde—shredded coconut-covered ricegluten balls with a dark, caramelized coconut center and kuih lapis—rice flour and coconut water steamed into rainbow layers that are peeled off and eaten one by one. Along with this came a hot cup of Malaysian coffee that has a hearty, rich flavor and is sweetened with condensed milk.
Expo Central
For a nation the size of Rhode Island, Singapore is awash with convention centers, each offering its own unique advantages and striving to be the biggest and most flexible venue with the most comprehensive solutions for meetings and conventions. Located on the rapidly developing eastern side of the island, in Changi, is the Singapore Expo, the largest convention and exhibition center in Southeast Asia. The Expo is just a five-minute drive from Changi International Airport and can also be reached by Mass Rapid Transit (MRT). The armadillo-like structure contains 10 exhibit halls that together total 100,000 square feet of contiguous, column-free space. These mercurial event halls can be adjoined and partitioned in countless ways and have the added benefit of ground-floor access, a necessity for shows involving heavy machinery and equipment from Caterpillar trucks and excavators to the latest in maritime equipment and technology. Seen bare, the exhibit halls have a brightly lit, hangar-like appearance but can be transformed with the help of the Expo's expert support team to accommodate any size event and design vision. Foyer areas take advantage of the convention center's floor-toceiling windows and are popular areas for cocktail receptions and small-scale exhibits—a new trend that Expo representatives say is popular with exhibit sponsors. For large-audience events, including music concerts, symposiums, and theatrical performances, the Expo offers the MAX Pavilion, a state-of-the art event hall with seating capacity for 6,500 people. The MAX Pavilion has set the stage for the likes of Bob the Builder and Air Supply, a national favorite in Singapore.
To make life easier for international MICE organizers, the Expo has teamed up with a network of five- and fourstar hotels to form what is called the Trusted Partner Programme, intended to bring preferential rates and upgrades, among other perks, to those who book space at the Singapore Expo. Two Beach Club—a delightful beachfront clubhouse and hotel with a veranda lounge and Olympic-sized swimming pool—and the Grand Mercure Roxy, a reliable four-star hotel with impressive dining choices and a desirable location in the Katong area, which is known for its traditional laksa soup and Peranakan heritage.
Originally published July 1, 2010
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