Revitalising inbound travel to Singapore on the SQ mobile app

When COVID-19 struck, Singapore's travel and tourism industry took a heavy blow. In partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board, we set out to rebuild traveller confidence and help revive the local businesses that depended on visitors returning.

These were some of the first travellers back after two years of closed borders. Starting to travel again, when entry rules were still in flux and international travel felt unfamiliar. The brief centred on rebuilding confidence in travelling to Singapore.

Our goal: help travellers to Singapore plan their trip by showing STB recommended places, events and activities.

Finding the right moment of value

We needed to know where in the travel journey this feature would matter most to SQ travellers. Would it inspire someone to book a trip to Singapore, or support travellers already planning, or already in, the country? We took both a qualitative and quantitative approach.

When interviewing users

As a warm-up question during usability testing, we asked: "Can you describe a specific time when you felt a strong longing to embark on a journey? What factors or influences contributed to this desire and motivated you to explore new destinations?"

Two themes came up again and again:

Looking at how other travel apps handle discovery

We studied how other travel apps handle discovery, sharing the strongest examples at the ideation workshop to prime participants going in. A few patterns stood out:

Placing the feature at the right moment

We placed the feature after a traveller had a confirmed booking to Singapore, which meant it belonged in "My Trips," alongside other contextual planning tools, staying available for the whole trip.

Early testing pointed to the homepage as the entry point with the widest reach. But our own research showed travel apps weren't where inspiration was happening during this period. My Trips reached a smaller audience, but one that had already committed to travelling to Singapore.

Two limitations we had to design around

Because this feature relied on an external tourism API, two constraints shaped the design early.

Designing within an existing system

We reused SQ's existing design system instead of inventing new components, using the same patterns our users were already familiar with.

The feature surfaces inside "My Trips" as a contextual entry point once a user has a confirmed booking to Singapore. From there, users can browse a curated listing of places and activities, drill into a details screen for each one, and jump straight into Google Maps for directions or the native dialler to call ahead and check availability.

Right feature, right people

Because the tourism content came from an API tied to confirmed Singapore bookings, the feature could only activate for travellers who already had a flight booked to Singapore, which shaped both the technical approach and how we measured success.

Adoption is measured among users with a confirmed booking to Singapore (the only segment the feature could activate for), and is confirmed against deployment data. Return-visit and outlink-click figures are approximate, pending final confirmation.

Where this could go next

A few enhancements were scoped but not built:

Reflections

This project sharpened how I think about designing for a moment that hasn't happened yet. We weren't optimising an existing behaviour; we were trying to rebuild a traveller's confidence and desire to travel, from inside an app they'd open for entirely different reasons, like managing a booking or checking in.

Relying on an external API meant designing for uncertainty from day one, without that ever becoming the user's problem to notice. Gating activation to a confirmed booking felt like a constraint at first, but it turned out to be the right choice, keeping the feature relevant to everyone who saw it.

A simple discovery feature turned out to depend entirely on the decisions around it: where it sits in the journey, and what data it can rely on.