Singapore Tourism Board: Destination Experience Workshop

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Photo of the Singapore Merlion statue spraying water into a pool with people watching and city skyline in the distance

Presentations on tour development and storytelling // 2016

Turnstile’s Andrew Gustafson was invited to attend a two-day workshop in Singapore hosted by the Tourism Board’s Tour & Industry Development team and attended by local tour operators, attractions, and guides. Andrew facilitated a workshop and presentation, “Developing Quality Tour Content,” on tour development, guide training, and effective visitor engagement techniques, and delivered the keynote address on the second day of the program, “Delivering the Story: Storytelling Techniques for Guided Tours,” drawing on Turnstile Tours’ experience with multi-sensory engagement, narrative development, and guide evaluation. Andrew also visited several attractions in Singapore and provided feedback on guide technique and interpretation, including the Chinatown Heritage Center and Singapore City Tours.

The Fall of Singapore, 1942

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February 15 marks the anniversary of one of the most dramatic and shocking moments in the Second World War, the fall of the “Gibraltar of the East,” Singapore, in 1942. While Singapore is very, very far away from the places that we give tours, we have a special connection to that country, and to the people there conducting scholarship on World War II history, an area of particular interest to us.

Turnstile Tours had the opportunity to travel to Singapore in October 2013, at the invitation of the Singapore Tourism Board and the National Heritage Board, where we led trainings for many of the country’s museums and attractions on how to make guided tours more engaging and interactive. One of the highlights of our trip was visiting the Changi Museum and meeting the team at Singapore History Consultants, Singapore Walks, and Journeys. This family of companies is in many ways a kindred spirit to Turnstile, for-profit businesses with a strong focus on research, education, and preservation. They operate many of the country’s World War II-related historic sites, but they also conduct an enormous amount of archival and archeological research to document and interpret this important history.>> Continue reading

Happy International Street Vendors Day!

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November 14 is International Street Vendors Day, a global celebration first organized by StreetNet International in 2012.  The purpose of this day is for all street vendors and advocacy organizations to express their solidarity and work together to support the hard-working vendors of the world.  We have spent the last four years working with dozens of vendors across New York City, as well as advocacy groups like the Street Vendor Project, to not only share their amazing food and stories, but also to educate the public about issues facing street vendors and their daily challenges and triumphs.

Recently, Cindy and I had the opportunity to travel to Southeast Asia (as guests of the Singapore Tourism Board – in the coming weeks we will have many more posts about our time in Singapore and the connections between their sites, attractions, and history and those of our own island city), and we spent much of our time exploring the varied street vending traditions of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.>> Continue reading

Singapore Tourism Board & National Heritage Board: Guided Tour Consulting

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Guided Tour Consulting for the Attractions and Experience Development Series in Singapore // 2013

Staff from Turnstile Tours and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum were invited to Singapore by the country’s Tourism Board, Association of Singapore Attractions, Workforce Development Agency, and the National Heritage Board to provide trainings and consultations on storytelling skills and developing more engaging, interactive guided tours for cultural institutions, tourist attractions, and tour companies. As part of a professional development series entitled “Delivering the Story,” Turnstile Tours’ Cindy VandenBosch and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s Director of Education Miriam Bader conducted a half-day seminar, full-day masterclass, and keynote lectures on topics such as multi-sensory engagement on tours, training and retaining guides, responding to visitor feedback, current trends and practices in museum education and tourism, and community-based partnerships for cultural programming. 

>> Continue reading