Singapore has been heralded as a shining example of best practices to confront and control the spread of COVID-19.
Given its strong trading relationships with China, the destination identified its first cases early, in the last week of January 2020.
Despite still being in the early stages of the pandemic’s life cycle, Singapore provides an excellent example of how the hotel industry is impacted by the interplay of viral spread, government policy and social behavior – both at home and outside its borders.
Despite keeping the spread of coronavirus controlled for nearly two months through diligent testing and quarantining, new challenges arose in mid-March as Singapore elected to keep its borders open while neighboring Malaysia announced a lockdown.
This resulted in thousands of workers who reside in Malaysia and work in Singapore gathering their belongings from home and staying in Singapore.
Over the coming months, by teaming up with the data science team at LodgIQ, Phocuswright is evaluating a broad swathe of hotel-related and other data across a variety of key metropolitan areas.
Our key objectives are to model the:
- Level of disruption
- Duration of disruption
- Shape of the recovery curve
The goal is to understand the similarities and differences in hotel market dynamics between destinations.
This is especially relevant, as some markets may have yet to peak in terms of the level of infections, while others are seeing active coronavirus case counts decline.
The second COVID-19 Hotel Forecast report, written by Robert Cole, covers the aforementioned Singapore. It is available for free below (download here) or via the Phocuswright website.