Singapore pushes alipay’s arrival: fight for Chinese tourists’ spending power

According to media reports, Alipay appears to be a “diplomatic business card” that attracts Chinese tourists in many countries, boosting the impression of “China friendly”.

Both Singapore and Finland hope to seize the huge “spending power” of Chinese tourists through cooperation with China’s mobile payment platform.

Such a strategy even helped Finland drive a 63% annual increase in Chinese tourists.




Recently, the Singapore Tourism Bureau, in partnership with the Ant financial Service, launched an “ambassador” event in Singapore to promote its mobile payment platform to Chinese tourists.

The event will send three visitors to the ambassador, who will visit Singapore based on Alipay’s design, which is based on gourmet, collectors and explorers, and three visitors will experience the three journeys and share their travel experiences in social media.

Through the campaign, the Singapore tourism authority and ant financial hope to promote their business more. Of course, ant financial is not the first time it has used ambassadors to promote local tourism and alipay platforms.

In 2016, ant financial launched a similar campaign in Finland. The company sent eight Chinese tourists to Helsinki and rovaniemi. Rovaniemi is a city within the Arctic Circle. Eight tourists were on a six-day tour of the two cities. During the journey, visitors can pay almost all the fees through alipay.

It turns out that Alipay marketing is one of the factors in Finland’s success in promoting tourism development in China. As the event started, data from Finland showed that the number of Chinese immigrants increased by 63% in 2017 compared with 2016.

The media believes that while adopting China mobile payment is not necessarily a guarantee of success, it certainly helps boost the impression of “” china-friendly” “destinations. This is especially important for destinations like Finland, which is not a particularly popular tourist destination.

Finland has successfully promoted its tourism to China, and Chinese tourists see Finland as an easy and convenient “stay” when traveling to and from Europe. The likelihood of such a short trip has increased dramatically, as there is no need to worry about currency or credit card rates.

It is worth mentioning that the consumption momentum brought by Chinese tourists has gained great attention in Singapore.



Last year, Singapore attracted 3.2 million of Chinese tourists, spending about $4.2 billion trillion, an average of about 1,300 dollars per entry, more than 887 dollars per average of China’s global travel.

The real data gap is even greater because the Singapore Tourism Authority calculates the airline ticket from Singapore to track revenues, which means that China’s large amount of Singapore tourism spending has not been counted.

As mobile payments in China have risen, some countries have come to realise that places that work with alipay or tencent’s WeChat pay can promote themselves as “” china-friendly” “countries through these big companies,Can bring more Chinese tourists.

Source: huanqiu.com