Singapore Travel Startups Have Advantages and Challenges That Come With the Territory
Skift Take
While global travel brands like Uber and Airbnb have had trouble scaling and competing in Southeast Asia, Singapore is a major meeting point for big brands and startups to learn what works, create partnerships and, for the startups, to grab venture funding in the region.
Singapore is one of the warmest hotplates for technology in Asia as the government has pumped $1.3 billion into the city's startup ecosystem and transformed it into Southeast Asia's Silicon Valley. But Singapore's cosmopolitan allure and culture of efficiency comes with a price: It has one of the highest costs of living in Asia and, for that matter, the world.
Although dozens of travel startups have launched in Singapore in the past five years as its economy became more powerful these rising costs have frustrated founders and forced them to get creative with talent recruitment.
Skift met with two Singapore-based travel entrepreneurs on a recent trip to the city and they talked of how exorbitant costs have made Singapore both a blessing and a curse for startups.
Fazal Bahardeen, CEO and founder of Halaltrip, a site helping Muslim travelers book hotels and discover Muslim-friendly destinations, has most of his team based outside of Singapore with his technology team is in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for example. He said if his entire team was based in Singapore he'd pay them three to four times their current salaries.
Similarly, Winnie Tan, founder and CEO of TripZilla, a travel pla
