News
Singapore opening for foreign visitors
October 9th 2020
Singapore’s Minister for Transport, Ong Ye Kung, said this week the country was ready to reopen its borders to foreign visitors and revive its status as an aviation hub. Read More »
In a statement to the Singaporean parliament, Ong said the government would take proactive steps to restore passenger traffic in a safe and controlled manner.
They included increasing Singapore's capacity to test for COVID-19, establishing more "reciprocal green lanes" for business travel and air travel bubbles for general visitors and a unilateral removal of border restrictions.
"What is at stake is not just hundreds of thousands of jobs, but our status as an air hub, Singapore’s relevance to the world, our economic survival and, in turn, our ability to determine our own future," Ong said.
"The longer our borders remain closed, the greater the risk of losing our air hub status, our attractiveness as a place to invest and our [ability] to create jobs because of those investments."
The coronavirus pandemic has smashed air travel in Singapore, which has been more severely impacted than almost every other country in the world given it has no domestic market.
Latest traffic figures showed Singapore Changi Airport handled 84,300 passengers in August, down 98.6% from 5.9 million in the same month a year ago. Commercial aircraft movements were 82.8% below the prior year.
Singapore Airlines (SIA), for decades a source of national pride, posted a net loss of S$1.1 billion (US$810 million) for the three months to June 30.
It also announced last month 4,300 jobs would go across the airline group due to COVID-19. The figure was recently reduced to 3,900 positions after pilots agreed to take deeper salary cuts.
Ong said testing for COVID-19 would reduce the reliance on quarantine measures, which have been shown in various passenger surveys to be the major deterrent to travel.
The minister's parliamentary statement said Singapore could conduct 40,000 tests a day by November 2020, compared with 27,000 a day currently and 2,000 daily last March.
"Testing is therefore the key to unlock air travel," Ong said."With COVID-19 around for a while, the emerging international practice is to be tested before travel; no different from us going through security and having our bags checked before boarding a plane.
"Changi Airport has set up a facility to swab up to 10,000 passengers a day, as a start. With some notice, it can ramp up the numbers quite readily. In the next few months, we plan to set up a dedicated COVID-19 testing laboratory at the airport to support aviation's recovery."
Ong said Singapore would pursue more "reciprocal green lane" arrangements with various countries for essential business and official travellers and continue to open Changi Airport to international transfer traffic, which now numbers about 2,500 passengers a week.
Singapore also would continue to unilaterally open its border to other countries that had comprehensive public health surveillance systems and comparable incidence rates.
While the number of travellers was expected to be small in the short-term, given many countries still had restrictions on people travelling internationally, Ong said unilateral opening was still meaningful, describing it as a sort of “standing invitation”.
"Purely from an infection risk point of view, the risk of a traveller from these places carrying the virus when they arrive at Changi Airport is no higher than that of a Singapore resident coming from Jurong or Sembawang," Ong said.
"Because we are of the same incidence rate, same risk profile. But as a precaution, we will subject these travellers to a COVID-19 test to ensure they are free from the virus."
Ong said Singapore would negotiate air travel bubbles, which were for general travellers, with safe countries and regions.
"The message we want to send to the world is this: Singapore has started to re-open its borders," Ong said.
"As we learn to control the virus and testing becomes much less of a constraint, the trade-off between health and economic needs, between lives and livelihoods, is no longer so stark, and the two do not have to be at odds."
