Restaurants and hotels fall short on satisfying tourists

According to the Institute of Service Excellence at SMU (ISES), visitors to Singapore were far less satisfied with its food and tourism offerings in 2014 than they were a year earlier. The institute's splicing of data collected from a survey of 4,850 locals and 3,750 tourists on the food & beverage and tourism sectors found that tourists were significantly unhappier than they had been a year before. And their dissatisfaction led to significant drops in the two sectors' Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore scores. "The profile of tourists to Singapore seems to be changing. They have different needs and expectations, they are better travelled, they are using a different benchmark to measure their expectations of Singapore against," said ISES Director Ms Caroline Lim. With the varied priorities of different segments of customers, businesses have their work cut out for them, ISES Academic Director Assistant Professor Marcus Lee said.