Singapore experienced a significant drop in tourist arrivals where visitors usually
stay for up to three days and transit onto their next destination. The trend for visitor
inflow is that visitor inflows fall sharply. This is especially true in the case of
Singapore, when visitor stays tend to be shorter and the high-end visitors stayed
away. As a result, tourism and other related industries were nearly crippled due to a
significant reduction in both leisure and business travel. For example, tourist arrivals
saw a significant drop of 15% in March 2003. The drop in tourist arrivals was 67%
in April 2003, and 65% for the month of May 2003 until the first week of June 2003.
The outcome was low visitor numbers relative to other months in 2003. See Figure 4
below.