Even though I had only been in Singapore for three days, I had already sampled cuisine from at least 30 different countries.

My friend and I enjoyed heaping plates of dishes like Hainanese chicken rice, barbecued sting ray, prawn noodles, beancurd spring rolls, roti, curries, and chilli crab as our local guide, Kim Ping, a passionate foodie and native Singaporean, expertly selected them for us as we hopped from hawker centre to hawker centre.

Every morsel brought back memories of our surrounds, a tiny country the size of an American city, so bursting with diversity that it might compete with some of the most important metropolises on the planet. The streets here are lined with churches, mosques, temples, and other religious buildings. Chinese, Malay, Indian, and European cultural components have been woven together. English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil could all be heard at the same time on any one block.

One had the impression right once that Singapore was a location where people from all over the world could live together in harmony and with excitement. So it seemed sense that this melting pot of nationalities and cultures would serve as the ideal location for international tourists to regroup.

The Singapore Tourism Board created a campaign named "SingapoReunions" to encourage travel to the nation following the pandemic, concentrating on seducing tourists looking for a location to rejoin with one another or ultimately meet for the first time. Through group discounts and alliances with resorts and hotels, the island nation aims to establish itself as a key location for friend and family gatherings.

According to Rachel Loh, senior vice president of the Singapore Tourism Board, Americas, "many of us have not been able to see our loved ones or meet new acquaintances in person these last few years." "With travel restrictions finally being relaxed, we were aiming to promote travel to Singapore as a means of reuniting, trying new things, and making up for lost time with individuals we were separated from," the organisation said.

The nation wants to take advantage of its reputation as one of the safest travel destinations in the world, which is in part supported by the fact that it has some of the tightest rules on the books, to attract families in particular.

I took a flight to Singapore to meet up with an old college friend from Amsterdam whom I only see once every two or three years in order to personally experience the campaign. Before the epidemic, my companion and I were usually content to choose a new area to meet and explore by utilising our two distinct locations. We went on vacation to Greece, had my birthday in Berlin, and then spent a week in Prague. However, similar to many long-distance friendships, the pandemic derailed a lot of our plans to get back in touch. We leaped at the chance to finally meet up for a few days in a new location when the possibility arose. It appeared to be just the kind of thing we would do in the past.

Singapore was fairly high on both of our travel wish lists even though neither of us had ever been there. What better moment to go large than today, in the age of vengeance travel, when many people may finally spend time with loved ones from whom they may have been estranged?

Singapore was far away from New York and Amsterdam. But if the past two years have taught us anything, it's that life is fragile.

The nation has high hopes that other people will share its sentiments. 1.5 million tourists visited Singapore in the first half of 2022, more than twelve times as many as the 119,000 who came during the same time period in 2021. The number has increased to 2,415,084 visitors in just the last three months, which is already 53% of the arrivals to Singapore during the same period in 2019.

Can Reunion Travel Save International Tourism? One Country Hopes Sohttps://t.co/Jrfsq68Y2I pic.twitter.com/q7FlmERnrX

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This nation caters to all interests, including those of foodies, explorers, wellness enthusiasts, and night owls, to mention a few.

The country's tourist authority anticipates that while foreign tourism is still only a small portion of the pre-pandemic levels, it will reach those levels in full by the middle of the 2020s.

It's simple to understand why. The gourmand, the explorer, the wellness enthusiast, and the night owl, to mention a few, all find something to enjoy in this country, according to Loh.

We caught up over cocktails at Republic and Analogue, two of Asia's 50 Best Bars, during our five days in Singapore. We tried the renowned hawker centres of the nation, which will be included to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in late 2020. We went shopping in Chinatown and Little India, went to mosques and temples, and enjoyed Kampong Glam's vibrant carpet stores.

We arrived during one of the busiest times of the year, so we were surrounded by tourists of all ages and nationalities looking for the same types of discoveries as we were. On the day of our visit, many multi-generational families flocked to Singapore's well-known Gardens by the Bay and the country's one-of-a-kind Hell's Museum, a spooky-sounding exhibition inside the Haw Par Villa theme park that explores how many world faiths perceive the afterlife.

Hotels and resorts affiliated with the Singapore Tourism Board have been providing these friends and family tourists with group-focused experiences, dining credits, discounted accommodation rates, and other perks as part of the SingapoReunions package.

According to Zinuan Long, manager of PR and communications at the Fairmont Singapore and Swissotel The Stamford, both of which are taking part in the campaign, "With the reopening of international borders, it was an opportune alliance." Both hotels "have experienced an increase in the amount of bookings for 2023 with customers from diverse regions of the world" since becoming participating partners.

The Singapore Tourism Board decided to prolong the promotion through the spring of 2023 because the number of tourists taking advantage of the package has been so encouraging.

Long is not shocked. He explained to me that Singapore's geographic location is a natural advantage. (Singapore had direct flights from Amsterdam and New York, and its central Southeast Asian location allowed for many connections to the rest of the area.) And enjoying wonderful food together is a national obsession that unites people.

Will other nations adopt the same policy? The campaign's first success in Singapore demonstrates that "friendcations" and multigenerational travel are still popular phenomena that don't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. The year 2023 might be the ideal time to get in touch with that distant relative or friend and go on an exciting journey.