Singaporetourismaccelerator

About the Accelerator

The Singapore Tourism Accelerator is a highly-selective, equity-free 4-month programme for the world’s most promising technology startups or pre-scaleups that can power the travel and tourism industry. The Singapore Tourism Accelerator is organised by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and its appointed innovation partners, Ravel Innovation and The Next Web.

We are looking for the very best in innovation and are particularly interested in companies that are developing solutions to future-proof the travel and tourism industry and help tourism companies thrive amidst the challenges brought about by COVID-19. Whether you already have some traction in the industry, or are looking to apply your solution to the industry for the first time, we want to hear from you.

For more information about the accelerator go to this website.

Pilot with Leading Businesses

The top companies will be selected based on their ability to help solve one of the challenge statements below from our Industry Partners. The programme's main focus is on the successful scoping and execution of a pilot agree upon prior to the start of the programme. Once selected, each team will be guided through an introduction to their pilot partner and given support during a series of capacity-building intensive workshops designed to facilitate the best introduction to the programme and given details on how to work closely with their respective Industry Partner to design, launch, scale and measure the success of actual pilot projects, before embarking on a 3 month pilot during the rest of the 4-month programme. The programme will feature opportunities to get to know and work with important players in the Singapore Tourism and Hospitality sector as well as the startup ecosystem.

What can you expect?

The selected companies will gain unparalleled access to work with some of Asia’s and the world’s most important industry players. They will learn in a series of capacity-building intensive workshops, including sessions to scope potential pilots, whilst preparing and executing on their pilots with selected industry partners.

The accelerator includes a programme to learn critical market entry skills, pilot design and implementation skills, building a company and culture that scales and fundraising strategies via workshops, 1:1 mentoring, peer learning, expert feedback, networking sessions with founders and investors, and industry events. The 4-month programme will end with a Demo Day with industry partners and investors.

Target Pilot Partner Profile

Innovative startups and pre-scaleups are encouraged to apply, that have existing customers, a proven product or service, or have raised at least a seed round that are ready to scale.
B2B or B2B2C focused. We are looking for companies that will be able to pilot solutions directly with travel and tourism businesses.
Technology company. We are looking for companies that have technology/ innovation that can power the tourism and hospitality industry.
Based anywhere in the world, but open to a residential programme based in Singapore itself
- Open-minded and collaborative in adapting their solutions to an original pilot with a tourism business
- Interested to enter or scale in Southeast Asia
- Interested to incorporate in Singapore
Ready to scale

Commitment

Two members of the company, at least one co-founder and a pilot project lead should commit to the full 4-month programme.
100% attendance is expected for all programme activities: workshops, learning events, mentoring activities and catch-ups with the programme team. The relocation stipends are tied to programme engagement.
You are expected to develop a product-pilot fit - either for a new solution from existing technologies or for an adapted solution with existing market validation to be tailored and scaled with the corporate partner.
The Pilot Implementation phase takes place over 3 months that will require leadership focus, resource deployment from the startup/scaleup ending with an Investor Demo Day.

Accor: Revolutionise housekeeping through digitalisation & optimisation

Context: In a world of labor shortage, Accor Group is looking for its 5,000 managed and franchised hotels at completely rethinking the way to provide bespoke housekeeping, improving room cleaning productivity by 50%, while meeting guest satisfaction and improving sustainability. Starting with Singapore where Accor Group has 28 managed & franchised properties in Singapore, the ambition is to find solutions which can scale further if successful. Spanning in ranges from economy to luxury segments, Singapore offers a good diversity representative of Accor’s portfolio worldwide and is therefore a good test bed for this challenge.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: The objective is to find a technology solution that allows us to re-think how we do, approach and optimise housekeeping in our hotels.This could be achieved by the use of technology to achieve any one or more of the following;

Exploring how we do housekeeping (e.g - define & adapt different levels or ways of housekeeping to optimise and reduce time taken to clean and service rooms)
Identifying inefficiencies in housekeeping process (repetitive steps, nonoptimal tools, resource involvements), and optimising / automating steps for better productivity
Encourage guests to contribute in housekeeping optimisation (e.g - opt for lighter / skip housekeeping)
Encourage housekeepers to utilise their expertise to innovate and improve housekeeping process

Accor Group is open to other creative and innovative ideas centred around housekeeping solutions, keeping in mind the focus of optimisation, guest experience and sustainability. In the detailed deck, applicants will have an overview of housekeeping systems currently in use across different hotels in Singapore.

Pilot Outcomes & Succes Metrics: 1) Increase in housekeeping productivity (more rooms cleaned per housekeeper, ideally doubling the number compared to existing situation - current process requires 20-25mins for a housekeeper to clean 1 room, coming to about 12-16 rooms per 8 hour shift). 2) Seamless, easy tracking of any new housekeeping customisations (e.g - light, moderate or full clean housekeeping customisations) & analytics.

Reverse Pitch Deck

Accor: Adaptive housekeeping through rich guest engagement

Pilot Objective & Requirements: The objective focuses specifically on offering different “levels” of housekeeping (light, medium, full or skip cleaning), to champion sustainability, a bespoke guest experience, and housekeeping optimisation.

To achieve this, we are seeking a solution that:

Maximises the collection of insights & data on guest housekeeping preferences.
Makes use of creative means or technology (e.g- incentives, gamification, sensors, etc) to ensure high level of engagement and data collection
Explore implementation on various stages of guest journey for maximum and optimal engagement (during booking, pre-check in, etc)
Analyses and measures efficiency of customised housekeeping offers and services, for further learnings and experimentation
is able to seamlessly communicate guest preferences to housekeepers for clear & optimised task distribution.

Pilot Outcomes & Succes Metrics: 1) High engagement from guests in requesting customised housekeeping preferences (<80% of all guests). 2) More rooms cleaned per housekeeper shift, ideally a target of doubling number of rooms compared to existing situation.

Potential Pilot Benefits: Being referenced as a solution across the whole Accor Group (5,000+ hotels under management or franchised) on a key topic expected by all hotels from economy to luxury. Provide a solution to the whole hospitality market on a common pain point

Reverse Pitch Deck

Millennium Hotels & Resorts: Automated guest check out experience & enhanced operational efficiency

Context: Millennium Hotels & Resorts is one of Singapore’s largest international hotel chain with over 150+ hotels worldwide. We have 6 hotels in Singapore with over 2,609 rooms in total. Our objective is to create technological automation of our check-out process to ensure seamless guest experience and efficiencies. The current check-out process is extremely manual and requires several team members to coordinate a check-out process. During high occupancies, guest may be required to queue for longer periods of time to process their check-out and billing, Longer wait times will delay room cleaning, which in turn delay the next check-in guest. Delayed awareness of guest check-out also results in a delay of housekeeping, leading to rooms being available later than initially possible.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: We are seeking a solution that will replace the manual check-out process, for both the guests and our staff. With a simple indication from the guest that they are checking out, the check-out process shall be initiated, in turn triggering backend processes including housekeeping, billing, etc. This guest engagement could happen at the front desk, or potentially even within the guest rooms.

Potential Pilot Benefits: If pilot is successful, we can roll this out to all hotels in Singapore, Asia and globally.

Reverse Pitch Deck

Millennium Hotels & Resorts: Low cost, accurate measurement of location and movement of staff and equipment within the hotel.

Context: Millennium Hotels is a global company with more than 120 hotels. We are applying Lean and analytics to improve performance, and getting a very accurate understanding of the location and movement of staff and equipment, will allow us to continuously improve process and performance. We are looking for a low cost solution that ideally does not use our WiFi and which can accurately span an entire property from basement to penthouse. Potential Pilot Benefits: Collaboration and proof of value with a global hotel chain. Ability to derive considerable insights from our other data streams to help improve their product.

Pilot Objective & Requirements:

Accurately measure the location and movement of staff to within centimetres. This will allow us to continuously improve processes such as supply chain and room cleaning. We will be able to measure the cause and effect of our actions. Test one floor of the hotel to start or two half floors on top of each other. Make these insights easily available to our team and to our analytics infrastructure. API is ideal.
Accurately measure location of equipment such as roll away beds, room service tables, vacuums, bell carts and more to improve service response times, save cost, and eliminate searching for equipement. Test one floor or two half floors to start.

Potential Pilot Benefits: Collaboration and proof of value with a global hotel chain. Ability to derive considerable insights from our other data streams to help improve their product.

Reverse Pitch Deck

Millennium Hotels & Resorts: Labour forecasting, scheduling, optimisation, and deployment

Context: Millennium Hotels has six properties in Singapore and many more around the world. As an industry, we have suffered from labour shortages for many years. With the recovery from Covid underway, we expect this situation only to worsen. Our sister hotels around the world are also suffering from similar challenges.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: We are looking for a solution that will allow us to forecast demand by 15-minute periods and then optimally schedule labour against it including cross deployment to maximize both efficiency and service. The solution should also allow us to understand opportunities for cross deployment by allowing us to see inversely correlated demand curves. In addition, it should help us to understand “shrinkage” due to illness so we can account for it in scheduling. In a perfect world, the tool would inform us of the optimal mix of outsource vs. fixed labour, and it should understand local labour laws or allow for them to be programmed in. Finally, ideally it would understand what is happening real time to allow us to shift resources to optimize service and productivity. Finally, as we have a cluster of hotels, we would like to be able to combine this data for all of them to allow for cross deployment between hotels as well between departments.
The tool should allow us to print and communicate schedules and ideally would enable visualization on mobile devices and the swapping of shifts given employees have the same skills.

Potential Pilot Benefits: Ability to work with an owner managed hotel company that could rapidly adopt this technology if we can prove real improvements on the KPIs above.

Reverse Pitch Deck

Pontiac Land Group: To enable a hybrid digital and live centralised call centre for the PLG group of hotels

Context: Pontiac Land Group owns a suite of internationally acclaimed luxury hotels, each recognised for their distinctive brand of hospitality, attentively attuned to the needs of business, leisure and resort travellers. Inspired by a desire to constantly improve guest experiences, they continue to garner accolades from prestigious travel, trade and lifestyle publications. In Singapore, this includes Regent Singapore, Conrad Singapore, Capella Singapore, and the Ritz-Carlton Singapore. Due to the current manpower crunch in the industry, there is a lack of staff in each of our hotels’ internal call centres. This has resulted in missed calls and lowered service quality, translating to a potential loss of revenue. We aim to use technology to fill the manpower gap, to supplement work of live agents.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: We envision a solution that will support our plans of consolidating the hotels’ individual call centres. The solution should facilitate both automated and live query answering. For example the solution should be able to filter queries based on type of query and level of complexity, thereby providing automated responses for simple queries, and routing complex queries to a live agent. Queries should also be filtered according to the respective hotels, as well as if the call is from an external source, or internal from a guest room. Examples of general queries include restaurant promotions and opening hours. All in all, it is crucial to maintain the high service standards that our hotels uphold. At the moment the solution should support english language. As the solution is scaled up eventually it would need to support other languages such as chinese, japanese and russian. Additionally, would be nice to have the solution integrate with Hotel’s room reservation system in the future to support room reservation.

Potential Pilot Benefits: Commercial deployment across PLG’s suite of luxury hotels, beginning in Singapore, and potential to Maldives and across other assets in Singapore.

Changi Travel Services: Timely and interactive engagements with customers to gather real-time feedback in a structured manner

Context: CTS provides a range of services to Free & Independent Travellers (FIT) through a one-stop-shop concept. Travellers travel 3-4 times a year and we want to increase mindshare to promote cross-selling on a more frequent basis. Changi Mobile was launched in Sep 2021 and it offers SIM only plans. As a new entrant in this sector, we want to find out what can help to increase brand awareness and subsequently drive customer loyalty. The target audience will be families with young children residing within Singapore.

There is a need for a digital solution to have timely engagements with our customers to understand their pain points at the time of occurrence and to collect feedback in the form of rich qualitative data to understand their retention decisions to shape Changi Mobile’s service offerings.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: A solution that will:

Allow customers to provide their feedback digitally in real time in an easy and efficient manner.
Experiential tools and features
Automation to channel feedback to the relevant team/personnel
Resides on Changi Go mobile app

Potential Pilot Benefits: 1) Opportunity to work with one of the more recognised brand name in Singapore. 2) Potential for cross-deployment across CTS’s other business lines.

Reverse Pitch Deck

Frasers Property Retail: Digital tenant onboarding solution

Context: Frasers Property Singapore is one of the largest retail mall owners and operators in Singapore, who strives to enhance the user experience of our stakeholders (tenants and staff) through digitalisation of on-boarding process as well as data analytics.Presently, the tenant onboarding process is manual (combination of face-to-face meetings, emails, calls, hardcopy submissions) and can be frustrating for both tenants and staff. We hope to be able to digitalise / semi-digitalise the process.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: Introduce a digital onboarding solution to assist tenants in the onboarding process. For the purpose of the pilot, we are looking at a solution that can achieve at least 3 from the following list of steps, and show capability of onboarding the others beyond the pilot.

Obtaining details of contact persons and contact details
Download guidelines (e.g. design & fit-out)
Schedule meetings (e.g. kick-off meeting)
Submit plans and forms
Download renovation forms or complete digital forms
Admin services (e.g. General Work Permit application)
Make payments (e.g. renovation deposit, admin fee)
Marketing initiatives onboarding

Pilot Outcomes & Success Metrics: 1) Tenant satisfaction score or qualitative feedback 2) Time motion comparison (before and after)

Potential Pilot Benefits: Commercialise the solution to other Fraser malls (12 in total in Singapore) as well as other retail mall operators

Reverse Pitch Deck

Frasers Property Retail: Analytics of energy consumption (Landlord)

Context: Frasers Property Singapore is one of the largest retail mall owners and operators in Singapore, who strives to enhance the user experience of our stakeholders (tenants and staff) through digitalisation of on-boarding process as well as data analytics. Presently, our energy consumption is provided as a single number. There is no breakdown to explain reasons why there are changes in energy usage. We would like to introduce a way to monitor, analyse and compare the data so as to have actionable insights.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: To discover reasons for fluctuations in landlord’s overall energy consumption through:

Collect and monitor energy data at granular level
Compare energy data with other data sources (e.g. footfall data, meteorological data).

To propose actionable insights through the above to reduce overall energy consumption.

Pilot Outcomes & Success Metrics: 1) Prove the fidelity of the model 2) Lowered energy consumption through optimization of the model

Potential Pilot Benefits: Commercialise the solution to other Fraser malls (12 in total in Singapore) as well as other retail mall operators

Reverse Pitch Deck

Far East: Hyper-personalized guest experiences at scale

Context: Far East Hospitality is a premier hospitality assets owner and operator with presence in 9 countries worldwide with a stable of 10 unique and complementary brands catering to different guest profiles such as wellness conscious, urban explorers, social connectors. We understand the importance of personalization as we pivot towards quality tourism and to do this effectively, we require an innovative solution to automate the internal and external information matching and gathering process mostly from scratch, categorise them into different persona, providing insights so our staff are trained to objectively make a decision, plan and put into action.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: All upcoming hotel guests insights (ie: Hobbies, Interests, Preferences). We want to have the capability to refresh the data on demand basis because some reservations received can be last minute (Less than 24 hours). The hobbies, interests and preferences information will allow us to match the guest with our staff that have something in common as an icebreaker conversation. Our staff will be provided with training to ask some relevant questions to get more insights on guest stay as to then prepare a surprise and delights during the course of stay (example: guest mention wanting to try chicken rice, staff can send the dish up to guest room). These preferences can then be inputted by staff in our Property Management System (Opera) which can be used as “Internal information” in case the same guest is coming back.

Challenges:

We do not have loyalty program and CRM presently and no plan to roll that in short term (ie: next 3 years)
Very little to no repeat guests. This means that guests persona are mostly build from scratch
Ability to pull all relevant “external information” available such as social media, reviews, forums, online communities, news, etc. The approach suggested must be in compliant with all relevant privacy laws
Other than pulling “external information” the solution must be able to also leverage on “internal information” found in our Property Management System to build a complete persona

Pilot Outcomes & Success Metrics: 1) Guest satisfaction 2) Staff satisfaction (Validation of accuracy of information provided, User-acceptance)

Potential Pilot Benefits: Scale up to 16 hotels (Multiple brands) in Singapore, and many more abroad.

Reverse Pitch Deck

National Gallery Singapore: Creating memorable art exhibitions for visitors through systems that encourage reflections, learnings, and co-creation

Context: The National Gallery Singapore is a museum of Southeast Asian modern art. It is the custodian of the world’s largest public collection of Southeast Asian art and Singapore’s national collection. It is an important ecological node for the regional cultural sector, producing new research, thought leadership, resources as well as future generations of cultural producers and consumers. It is a cultural attraction that provides edutainment and contributes to the nation's soft power. We aim to increase Art Appreciation through Memorable Exhibition, Experiences and Dialogues around Art. Our audiences are onsite and online. One of our objectives is to foster greater art appreciation, as measured through no. of visits, and no of recurrent visits/engagement.

The Gallery would like to explore:
a) Being able to share their own and see other's interpretations in a safe space can help visitors to reflect on their learnings (eg for exhibitions)
b) Visitors desire to “leave a mark” to be part of something bigger and as a reason to return

Pilot Objective & Requirements: The Gallery aims to be more visitor centric, and unlike other museums in developed cities like New York and London, Singapore as a young nation has a long way to go in developing cultural maturity including art appreciation as a social need. The Gallery seeks to catalyse this process, and is involved with innovation and transformation for this purpose. Possible outcomes: Startup to be user centric in engagement to explore how to elicit visitor thoughts and expressions during or post-visit to art exhibitions at the Gallery. This also aims to encourage new visitors to feel at home by seeing how other visitors felt.

Pilot outcomes & Success Metrics: For sample of outcome KPIs to help drive solution:

No of artworks or artists recalled
No. of visitors sharing their thoughts/learnings for other visitors
No. of visitors who listened/watched other visitor thoughts/learnings
Potential: No. of online participants (local, foriegn)
Potential: No. of conversion from online to onsite
Potential: No. of continuation from onsite to online (feedback loop)

Potential Pilot Benefits: 1) Prototype can be tested and eventually showcased at Gallery, which has a dedicated Y-Lab Showcase space for new arttech innovations 2) Potential commercial deployment at scale across Gallery and related art institutions

Singapore Flyer: Interactive mobile guest experience, more than just a view.

Context: Singapore Flyer is an iconic attraction at Marina Bay, a place where one can enjoy Singapore-inspired cultural experiences as well as the panoramic view of our garden city. Flyer 360+ was introduced in 2018 as a virtual tour guide to improve the In-Capsule experience of Singapore Flyer, and this was done mainly through interactive tablets and large screens. Other than being hardware bound, there are also limitations to the user experience as it’s defined and restricted by the existing infrastructure.

Pilot Objective & Requirements: Improve the In-Capsule experience to increase customer engagement, and increase word-of-mouth marketing/publicity.At the same time, reduce hardware dependency to simplify operational maintenance for Singapore Flyer. The current programme could also be further enriched by being more dynamic and interactive. And possible solutions should ideally be more tech-driven (for example, more AR/VR experiences, gaming, holographic, web-app, instagrammable, blow-up on tiktok etc) and also have the possibility for personalization, thus improving the overall journey inside the capsule. The solution should also be scalable and possibly be able to be installed/included as part of another web app in future which would provide more functions and increased capabilities for all visitors.

Potential Pilot Benefits: Possible deployment of solution within other attractions at Singapore Flyer and even for premium experiences in capsule (e.g.Dining, Corporate and Wedding Flights)

Reverse Pitch Deck