ShopBack’s Singapore Snapshot

Travel & Leisure sees one of the strongest month-on-month increases in our dataset, rising from 0.98x in August to 1.11x in September. This comes alongside a rise in eSIMs expenditure. This likely reflects greater spending on short-haul trips, staycations, attractions and family activities during the school break.

Singapore users typically book their travel more than two months in advance, making it likely that consumers are locking in their year-end holiday plans in September. Travel demand begins building from September, making it the start of a sustained year-end booking season rather than a short-lived spike.

Did you know that Singapore users are APAC's earliest travel planners? The median hotel booking is made 69 days before check-in, more than 3x the lead time seen in markets such as Indonesia and South Korea.

Averaged across 2023 to 2025, Travel & Leisure ran at 1.11x its typical day in September, 1.18x in October and 1.24x in November, against a base of 1.00 for the category's average day across the year.

Digital spending edges up in September, reaching 1.07x, and shows a similar pattern across other school holiday periods, including March, June and November.

This suggests holiday periods may be associated with a greater appetite for in-home entertainment and increased spending on digital subscriptions, streaming services and notably, VPNs.

The rise in VPN spending is particularly interesting. Children and families typically spend more time consuming online entertainment during school holidays, and those spending more time at home may be turning to VPNs for greater privacy when browsing and shopping online. As concerns around online security and privacy grow, VPNs appear to be shifting from a niche tool to an everyday digital utility. Holiday periods also coincide with a seasonal pickup in travel, where VPNs may serve a different but reinforcing purpose: securing connections on public Wi-Fi. Whether at home or abroad, the pattern suggests consumers are increasingly reaching for VPNs across a range of everyday contexts.

Home emerges as the strongest in-store discretionary category in September (1.06x), outperforming both Beauty and Fashion. Online Discretionary Retail is also 1.06x in September, up slightly from 1.01x in August.

This may suggest households are spending more on home-related and discretionary purchases during the September school holidays, as families spend more time together and begin planning for the festive periods.