Hey, how about spending the long weekend in... Singapore? (test)

My cousin and his family flew to Singapore from the United States for a much-anticipated holiday a few weeks ago. They arrived with an itinerary more organised than the National Day Parade. Merlion at sunrise. Gardens by the Bay light show. Wok shopping in Chinatown. A hawker crawl with dish names highlighted in yellow. Some time on Day 2, my teenage niece asked whether we'd walked the Mandai Boardwalk that tourists were vlogging about on TikTok. Embarrassingly, we still hadn't seen it.

I'm not alone in this. Ask around, and you'll hear a version of the same story. Colleagues who've never done the Southern Ridges, despite living five MRT stops from it. Friends who found out about the fireflies at Pulau Ubin from an Instagram account before they heard about it from a fellow Singaporean. We know this city as the place we live and work and play, not the place we experience with wonder.

The numbers back this up. Outbound travel bookings around 2025's National Day were up 17 per cent year on year, with Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Shanghai leading the destination charge.

Going by the pictures I saw of the Batam return ferry queue and the jam at the Woodlands crossing, I wonder if it was even higher in 2026. Give us Singaporeans an extra day off, and we rarely think: "What shall I do with it?" Instead, it is: "Where shall I go with it?"

Ironically, while crowds of holidaying Singaporeans depart the country, a record total of 16.9 million people flew, sailed or drove into Singapore in 2025. They come for the things in plain sight but which many of us have stopped seeing: the skyline, harbour, greenery, hawker centres, the ease of getting around.

Somewhere in that gap between "tourists travel here for this" and "we've been meaning to check that out" sits a genuinely odd paradox. We are, by most accounts, some of the most overworked, leave-starved people in the region, forever wishing we had more time. Then the time appears, and we remove ourselves from the one place we were wishing we had more time to enjoy.

Where the paradox gets expensive

Here's where it stops being just a quirk of the Singaporean psyche and starts having a price tag. Singapore's food and beverage sector has had a brutal time of it recently. Retail food establishments closed in 2025 at the highest rate in 20 years -- shocking, considering we had the Covid-19 pandemic in between, too. More than 2,400 establishments have shut down, with softer consumer spending cited as one of the reasons alongside rising rents and manpower costs.

Every long weekend that sends a wave of us to Batam or Bangkok is also a long weekend that doesn't send us to the new bar in Tengah, or the hawker centre that just opened in Punggol, or the restaurant in Sembawang trying to make it past its first 18 months.

In a year when local merchants are counting every dollar, it's worth remembering that spending our holiday money closer to home is also, quietly, doing something useful. Every dollar counts in hard times, and it counts a little more when it stays in the neighbourhood.

There's a generational angle to this, too. If the only version of "adventure" our kids see us model is a flight number and a passport, we shouldn't be surprised when they grow up assuming there's nothing worth discovering closer than an hour's drive from home. Teaching them to find something new in Toa Payoh or Jurong Lake Gardens is teaching them a kind of appreciation that doesn't require a boarding pass.

We've actually done this before, out of necessity rather than virtue. Shortly after the pandemic, when leaving the country still felt like a novelty we weren't quite ready to trust, my wife planned a three-day hike around our own island.

We stayed in a different hotel each night, in a different corner of Singapore each time. We ate at hawker centres and food courts we'd never once visited. It sounds almost absurd written down, a staycation with actual mileage, but it's one of the more memorable trips we've taken, and I still think about it and wish we could do it again.

We treated our own city the way we'd treat somewhere we'd flown eight hours to see, and it delivered. I should point out that it was also not the traditionally touristy parts of the city that delivered a great experience.

The irony is that we all managed to enjoy this island plenty when we had no choice but to stay on it.

During the circuit breaker period, our family walks became sacred. Park connectors turned into main-character moments. My daughter turned our stretch of the park connector in Queenstown into her own Hogwarts.

A gap between two hedges became "Platform 9 3/4 ", and you had to walk through it "just right". A shady, dim, overgrown stretch became "The Forbidden Forest", and nobody was brave enough to run through it alone. On one walk, the monitor lizard under a bridge became a basilisk.

This stretch of the park connector that we'd walked down for years previously without noticing became, for a while, the most magical stretch of Singapore. We rediscovered our own backyards because the rest of the world was, briefly, unreachable.

It shouldn't take a pandemic to make us pay attention to what's on our doorstep, and there's no reason we can't enjoy this island now with the same curiosity and sense of wonder.

So, here's a modest proposal for the next long, or short, weekend, alongside whichever ferry or flight is already booked. Give a couple of those days to Singapore, properly. Walk somewhere you've only ever driven past. Eat where the queue is unfamiliar. Spend the money you'd have spent on airport transfers at a bar in a part of town you couldn't confidently point to on a map.

Do it before your cousins visit and ask if you've been -- not after. Experiencing a destination like a local is supposedly the most elevated type of holiday. Let's try that at home before we pay top dollar to do it elsewhere.

Krishnan Menon is a senior marketing and transformation leader with more than 30 years of experience across the Asia-Pacific. He is also a distinguished fellow at the Nanyang Centre for Marketing and Technology at Nanyang Technological University's Nanyang Business School.

Source: Straits Times © Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. Permission required for reproduction.

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