Singapore – This Chinese New Year season, spending by Chinese and other Asian tourists surpassed that of CNY 2019, with Southeast Asia (SEA) as one of the top travel destinations globally, according to a press release by Alipay.
Notably, Alipay categorised SEA as one of the most popular travel destinations for Chinese tourists, with Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore combined seeing a 7.5% increase over 2019, and a 580% leap over 2023.
Going into more detail, the global top destinations in SEA are namely, Thailand placing 4th, Malaysia (5th), and Singapore (6th). Alipay+ played a role in the rankings of the aforementioned countries, enabling new international e-wallets to be used within each country.
In Singapore, Alipay enabled the use of six new e-wallets namely, Hipay (Mongolia), MPay (Macao SAR, China), MyPB by Public Bank (Malaysia), Toss Pay and Naver Pay (South Korea), and Tinaba (Italy).
On the other hand, Thailand also received these six options, with the addition of GCash (Philippines), Changi Pay (Singapore) and OCBC Digital (Singapore). Malaysia received these options as well, and gained access to HelloMoney by AUB (Philippines) and TrueMoney (Thailand).
Talking about this turnout, Cherry Huang, general manager of Alipay+ offline merchant services, Ant International, commented, “Based on the recent Chinese New Year spending trends, we can see that it has already far surpassed 2023 and back to 2019 levels. Other than Chinese tourists, we have also seen an increase in spending by other Asian tourists via our Alipay+ partner payment apps.”
