Singapore introduces international business travel ‘bubbles’

The new 780,000-square-foot facility, which has 150 guest rooms and 40 meeting rooms, is located at the Singapore Expo Convention & Exhibition Centre, near Changi Airport.

For the cost of a room (which starts at US$287), business travellers can avoid a 14-day quarantine by staying within the confines of the facility, sleeping in hotel-style rooms, with hot meals delivered to their doors, and will be able to conduct in-person business meetings in special rooms that have airtight glass panels and separate ventilation systems, as well as a UV-sanitising document transfer box that allows individuals to pass documents back and forth.

Travellers are also expected to undertake several Covid tests throughout their stay and, should a traveller staying in the bubble test positive, they will be transported to the nearest medical facility in Singapore.

Enhancing the options for travel during the pandemic

“Without such a facility, travel options are essentially binary – either stay at home due to travel restrictions, or fly overseas and endure long periods in quarantine,” Robin Hu, Head of International Policy at Temasek and Chairman of SingEx-Sphere Holdings, two of the project's developers, said in a press release.

Connect@Changi says that it plans to have the capacity to host 1,300 travellers at a time by the end of the year.

It might all sound like a bit of a strange concept, but sometimes the importance of an in-person meeting cannot be undervalued. In the leisure travel industry, ‘quarantine resorts’ such as those being launched in Hawaii were established during the pandemic, allowing travellers to take holidays while accommodating the stringent social distancing and health and safety rules that need to be imposed.