Singapore is the place to be this week

For tourism practitioners interested in the Chinese outbound tourism market, Singapore is the place to be this coming week. ITB Asia is opening its door at the Marina Bay Sands from Wed. 25th to Fri 27th. The 2017 edition was fully booked ahead of schedule, so close to 1,000 exhibitors will meet and discuss business with more than 10,000 attendees. A huge number of panels and presentations taking place during the ITB Asia conference will add to the knowledge and contacts to be gained.

This year the topic of the keynote speeches at the conference will be Artificial Intelligence and its impact on the travel industry, with two major industry leaders from IBM and Google taking the stage. The recent, rather scary, news that the programme AlphaGo Zero of Google’s artificial intelligence group Deepmind took just three days to become the unbeatable world champion in the board game of Go by not relying on learning from human examples, but by just learning the rules and teaching itself in a deep learning process through millions of games, will make the words of the Google representative Rob Torres even more interesting.

Don’t, however, let yourself be fooled. The main topic of this year’s ITB Asia will be the same as last year’s: China’s outbound tourism market.

By the way, if you want to meet COTRI’s director, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Georg Arlt, at ITB Asia, please find your way to the TUNISIA stand in Hall F, no. C52. COTRI is supporting the efforts of Tunisia to attract more Chinese tourists on behalf of the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ). Prof. Arlt will certainly be happy to meet readers of the COTRI Weekly and discuss travel offers for Chinese travellers to Tunisia, where the introduction of a visa-free policy for Chinese passport holders has seen the country transform into a hot destination for the Chinese outbound market. Certainly a destination worth knowing a lot about at the moment!

Have a successful week

The COTRI Team

Image: Aerial: Marina Bay Sands and Harbour by Marco Verch, Source: Flickr, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)