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SINGAPORE: Are you planning to watch the Singapore Grand Prix from the air-conditioned comfort of a hotel room with a veiw of the street circuit? Perhaps sharing the jacked-up room rate with a few friends?
Well, bad news — rooms with a view of the Formula 1 (F1) race are going to be very hard to come by. Apart from paying three to five times more for a room, there will also likely be a “minimum stay requirement”.
To “persuade” visitors to extend their stay, TODAY was told that downtown hotels, especially those with a view of the street circuit, are mulling a “minimum stay requirement” of as long as five days.
“If you think it is going to be cheaper booking a five-night minimum stay in some of the hotels, rather than buying a $200 ticket, well then, good luck to you,” said Mr Roche, executive director of Singapore GP, the company organising the event and selling the F1 tickets.
Why five days? Well, instead of just a weekend of fast cars and late-night partying, the organisers want to stretch the experience.
Sharing his vision for the Singapore F1 race in an exclusive interview with TODAY, Mr Roche, said: “We don’t want people to come for two days and get back on the plane, we want them to stay seven or eight days and say: ‘My goodness that was fantastic, Singapore was a great experience’.”
“We are all of the mind that we want the buzz to go on for two weeks,” added Mr Roche. “Some people will come for five days till the Sunday race, others will only arrive on Saturday and perhaps stay for five days till the middle of the week after the race.”
This would make even more sense, he argued, “particularly if the next F1 race is Shanghai, or the next race is Tokyo … It will be great if people come from Brazil or South Africa or Europe and wanted to stay in Asia, then there will also be spin-offs for our neighbouring countries”.
Mr Roche also revealed to TODAY that Singapore GP would invest as much as 70 per cent of its marketing budget overseas to attract at least 40,000 spectators and thousands more non-F1 fans from abroad. Singaporeans wanting a room with a view, will have also have to get in line behind priority bookings by individuals like F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, who is expected to fly in to town with “more than 2,000 people”.
Apart from his entourage of F1 diehards, there will also be high net worth individuals, flown in by international companies out to impress wealthy clients, and of course everyone linked to the F1 racing teams.
Said Mr Roche: “Even if you are not going to the Grand Prix, you will want to be in town because there are going to be parties ... there’s going to be glitz and glam all over.”
But to make the F1 experience a success, Mr Roche said that Singapore’s service sector needs a mindset change — a point that he said he had made to the Singapore Tourism Board on several occasions.
“I keep making comments: ‘Let’s improve our taxi service, make sure that when everybody gets out of the circuit at 11pm, there are taxis waiting. Let’s not have restaurants closing at 10pm. Let’s have double shifts and have them close at 3am’.”
Stressing the importance of the “overall experience”, Mr Roche said on the Padang, for instance, “we may have a little entertainment, jazz bands playing, maybe a hawker village”.
Mr Roche is confident the “novelty factor” will drive local Grand Prix ticket sales.
So how much will the F1 experience cost? That depends on the number of seats — but Mr Roche has promised a “really good mix of tickets”.
“I used to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could have $10 F1 tickets?’ But it isn’t going to happen,” he said. “Instead, we are trying to offer family packages well under the $100 mark for practice days … hopefully it will allow families to actually get close to a Formula 1 car and really experience it.” - TODAY/fa
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