Alipay Pushes Mobile Payments in Singapore
Chinese tourism has been a steadily growing part of the Chinese zeitgeist for some time now, and Alipay, commonly regarded as the high-roller’s alternative in mobile payments, has been pushing mobile payments as part of travel. It proved as much by dropping word our way about a new effort between itself and the Singapore Tourist Board.
The effort in question created the first-of-its-kind cashless trip from China to Singapore, an effort that brought together several Singaporean businesses-including Singapore Airlines, the Shangri-La Hotel, and Resort World Sentosa-as a way to draw attention to the sheer range of businesses that accept Alipay.
Alipay and the Singapore Tourist Board brought six users together for the trip, in three groups of two each. Each group—the Collectors, the Explorers, and the Foodies—got a customized itinerary from the Singapore Tourism Bureau that showed them some of the best and most relevant sites the country could offer.
Singapore Tourism Board director of marketing partnerships and planning Jacqueline Ng noted “We are pleased to have partnered with Alipay in this activity given their strong reach and understanding of the Chinese market, our top source market for both visitor arrivals and tourist spending. We hope to use the insights from this initiative to explore better ways of engaging Chinese visitors and to offer more compelling and seamless experiences through Alipay that are better tailored to their passions.”
It’s one more example of how well mobile payments work for travelers. We’ve seen several examples of this with Alipay previously as it’s worked to be just about everywhere a Chinese tourist might go to. Beyond that, we’ve seen Bank of America start taking mobile payments a lot more seriously thanks to business travel customers who wanted mobile payments access while traveling. Travel and mobile payments seem to go together like a hand in a glove, and Alipay’s recent outreach to Singapore makes perfect sense in that light. After all, it’s been on a tear in terms of adding countries, and by improving its usefulness, it draws in fresh users and keeps the current ones in place.
Alipay will likely continue on this thread until it’s accepted just about everywhere it can be accepted; each new country, each new store, is just a little more utility for Alipay.