Helping the community: S’pore’s first social enterprise travel agent

SINGAPORE – Officially registered with the Singapore Tourism Board in May this year, Heart Travel Pte Ltd is Singapore’s first social travel agent. Funded by successful entrepreneurs who want to give back to the community, Heart Travel aims to train and create jobs for the underprivileged.

The main objective of the set-up is to “help train and create jobs for the lesser privileged, like the lower-income, low-educated, handicapped, home-makers trying to immerse back into working life, ex-convicts (Yellow Ribbon), unemployed middle-aged, senior citizens, etc.”

Heart Travel said the move to establish a social travel agent company was spurred on by the difficulties facing the industry in Singapore. These difficulties include the shortage of Singaporeans willing to join the travel trade with low initial remuneration; keen competition within the industry with prevalent rate under-cutting low profit and high operational and labour cost; HR-intensive training of new staff; and high turnover of staff.