Singapore’s Old-School Travel Agencies Struggle While Innovators Thrive

Editor's Note: Skift launched a series, Gateway, as we broaden our news coverage geographically with first-hand, original stories from correspondents embedded in cities around the world. We started with regular reports several times per month from tourism hubs Beijing, Singapore and Capetown. Gateway Beijing and Gateway Singapore, for example, signify that the reporters are writing from those cities although their coverage of the business of travel will meander to other locales in their regions. Read about the series here, and check out all the stories in the series here. While it may seem that travel agencies are dropping like flies in hot and humid Singapore, the trade is far from languishing, although it is not without challenges. Figures from the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), which oversees the sector, show the total number of agencies has remained constant in the past few years at around 1,200, as has the rate of new agencies opening and exiting. The 104 agencies that ceased operations in the first six months are nothing unusual from figures in the same period past years (149 in 2016, 119 in 2015, 116 in 2014), with STB expecting the total number of agencies to remain roughly the same for the whole of this year. What jangled some nerves was the recent death of household names like 23-year-old MISA Travel and 40-year-old GC Nanda & Sons, which revives the question of whether old agencies could adapt to a new operating landscape. Former CEO of the National Association of Travel Agents Singapore (NATAS) Robert Khoo, a retiree who now lec