Boost me up, Scotty

By Yeoh Siew Hoon

When you arrive in Singapore, you get onto the ECP to get into the city. You can then take the AYE that takes you further into the financial district. Or you can take the KPE that gets you to the other side of the island. Or the PIE. Then there’s the also the CTE.

In case you didn’t know, these are the names of the expressways in Singapore which, for a small place, has a lot of them. They all come with ERPs which each time you cross cost you money.

Yes, to live in Singapore is to love acronyms.

This week, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) launched a recovery initiative called BOOST – it stands for Building On Opportunities To Strengthen Tourism.

It’s S$90 million worth of funds that will go towards stimulating demand and helping industry players ride out the rough times ahead.

It comes with a pile of goodies.

To drive demand, it’s launching a “Fly on US” (US for Uniquely Singapore) online campaign on its website and on Facebook where it is asking people to fill in a virtual aircraft with names and email addresses of friends (who they hope will remain their friends after) and every 2009th name wins a pair of free air tickets to Singapore.

Then there will be lots of deals under the “2009 reasons to enjoy Singapore” marketing campaign that will be launched Feb 19.
They have yet to think of an acronym for this but I’d recommend “2RES”.

However I do not think those that dream them up need any outside help. Ever since the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) unfolded, there has been a slew of initiatives that all come with their own little cute acronyms.

There’s BUILD – ”Business Upgrading Initiatives for Long-term Development” (US$134 million) to help small and medium-sized enterprises become more competitive through capability development.

PREP-UP (US$67 million) helps companies in ”Preparing for the Upturn” through a collection of training schemes to help companies develop personnel in science and technology through funding programmes.

SPUR – ”Skills Program for Upgrading and Resilience” – was launched in December to help companies retrain workers, save jobs, and cut companies’ retraining costs in order to spur up their service levels.

Then there’s YES! – ”Young Entrepreneur Scheme” which helps young Singaporeans nurture innovative startups by giving them cash from a $16 million Entrepreneurial Talent Development Fund, which is called ETDF for short.

This sudden spurt in acronyms is by no means a GFC-induced infatuation. Even before the days of Madoff, Ponzi and Lehman (MPL), Singapore’s statutory boards have been trotting out acronyms which are now part of the national vocabulary.

In tourism, there’s GEMS (Go The Extra Mile For Service) which now comes with a PLUS package because of the YES! GFC.

There’s also TIP-iT (Training Industry Professionals in Tourism) which may well reach tipping point during the next few months as more companies send their staff for training.

I suppose we in tourism should not laugh. We are also in love with acronyms ourselves.

Once I emailed a hotelier to ask if he was looking to hire someone who was an expert in CRS. He said, “Let me direct you to someone responsible for CSR.”

TYVM.

Catch Yeoh Siew Hoon every week at the Transit Cafe – www.thetransitcafe.com