How to Save Money on a Singapore Tour Package

Most advice about saving money on a holiday is about spending less while you are there. That is the smallest of the levers. The price of a Singapore package is largely decided before you leave, by four choices, and each of them can save more than a week of careful economising.

1. Move your dates, if you can move them at all

This is the biggest lever and the least used. Singapore hotel rates swing hard around school holidays, major events and the Formula One weekend — the same room in the same hotel can differ by half depending on the week. Airfares from India move on the same rhythm.

If your dates are fixed by leave or school terms, skip this. If they are flexible even by a week, ask for the price on two sets of dates before anything else. It takes one message and routinely saves more than every other item on this list combined.

2. Get the room sharing right

Accommodation is usually the largest component, and sharing changes it more than the star rating does. Two people in a room is not twice the cost of one — it is barely more. Three adults sharing takes roughly a third off the accommodation line each.

The related point: a family of four in one room, where the hotel allows it, is dramatically cheaper than two rooms and is completely normal in Singapore for children under a certain age. Ask. It is not always offered unprompted.

3. Choose three ticketed attractions instead of six

Entries are where Singapore budgets quietly fail. It is entirely possible to spend more on tickets than on the hotel, and people who book six spend the trip route-marching and are too tired to enjoy the last two. Three is usually right for a short trip, and the money saved is not a sacrifice — the unticketed city is most of what people remember afterwards.

Every price is published on our attraction tickets pages, so you can decide this at home with real numbers rather than at a counter.

4. Stay near an MRT station rather than at a landmark

A hotel with a view of Marina Bay carries a premium for the view. In a city where the MRT reaches almost everything in half an hour, a comfortable room ten minutes from a station delivers nearly the same trip for meaningfully less. Spend the difference on one thing you will actually remember.

Smaller savings that are genuinely worth taking

• Book entries before you fly. Cheaper than the gate, and it saves the queue.
• Eat at hawker centres. Not a compromise — it is some of the best food in the city, at a fraction of restaurant prices.
• Use the MRT, keep private transport for the airport. The airport run with luggage is worth paying for; the rest usually is not.
• Travelling as a group of ten or more? Ask for group rates. Ours start at ten travellers with one free place per twenty paying on the land cost — see Singapore group packages.

Three "savings" that cost more than they save

Cutting a night to save the hotel rate. The marginal night is usually the cheapest thing you will buy, because the flight and the transfers are already paid. Dropping from four nights to three saves a fraction of what it costs you in trip.

Booking the cheapest quote without reading it. A quote well under the others has made a decision you have not been told about — the hotel's location, shared instead of private transfers, or fewer named entries. That is fine if you chose it, and expensive if you did not.

Skipping travel insurance. It is a small sum against medical costs that are not small. Buy it whoever you book through.

The honest bit

A package is not automatically cheaper than booking yourself, and anyone claiming a secret cheaper internet is describing something that stopped existing a decade ago. What a package removes is variance — the rates are fixed in advance and the queue is not your problem. If you want to know whether your budget fits the trip you have in mind, send the numbers to +91 7838007208. If it does not fit, we will say so, and usually suggest moving the dates first.