GEIS-新闻详情

S'pore businesses gear up for more vaccination-differentiated rules, but some already feel the pinch

2021-12-17 00:00:00.0 海峡时报-新加坡原网页

SINGAPORE - One event organiser had to double the strength of the operations team to ensure visitors' compliance with vaccination-differentiated measures at a recent Mice event.

The additional cost is the new normal for some businesses in recent months, and will likely hit more firms as Covid-19 safe management protocols are rolled out to more settings and venues from Feb 1 next year.

Under such measures, attendees have to be fully vaccinated to enter the venue.

Among the most affected is the meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (Mice) industry, which after a two-year lull, saw a spate of large-scale events in November and December.

"Recruiting additional headcount for staff, training and organising them to ensure that the vaccination-differentiated measures would be adhered to added costs and time to our operations," said Mr Edward Liu, managing director of Conference & Exhibition Management Services (Cems), which organised three events in three weeks.

"We also had to double the number of people in the operations team."

The events - Restaurant Asia 2021, Architecture & Building Services 2021 and Singapore International Jewellery Expo 2021 - were held at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre between Nov 18 and Dec 5.

The largest of the three events, the jewellery expo, was at maximum capacity with 4,000 visitors over four days from Dec 2 to Dec 5.

"As our shows were trailblazer events, the vaccination-differentiated measures were new to us, our exhibitors and also the visitors," said Mr Liu.

The higher costs came from having to hire more workers, deep-clean the conference halls between sessions of visitors, provide identification bands to separate cohorts of visitors, and set up section dividers.

Similarly, Constellar, the organiser of Industrial Transformation Asia-Pacific 2021 at the Singapore Expo, said the extra protocols added about 10 per cent to operation costs.

The event from Nov 22 to 24 had around 3,600 visitors, and was one of the pilot ones under new protocols announced by the Ministry of Health in November. Other than being fully vaccinated, attendees also had to undergo pre-event testing.

Constellar chief executive officer Jean-Fran？ois Quentin said: "This is the new normal and we have to be prepared for our event business models to factor in the cost of implementing additional health and safety protocols for participants to engage effectively in a safe manner."

Cems' Mr Liu noted that the increased costs have a "large impact on Mice events, especially in lean times".