Changi Airport

Free bike rentals at Singapore’s Changi Airport

It’s only Monday, but we already have a nomination for Airport Amenity of the Week.

Singapore’s Changi Airport, which already wows travelers with free amenities that include butterfly and cactus gardens, movie theaters, and the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, now offers free bicycle rentals to passengers with layovers in Singapore.

The year-long program offers layover passengers free two-hour use of a bicycle to explore outdoor attractions in the airport’s vicinity, including the Jurassic Mile, a free outdoor display of more than 20 life-sized dinosaurs and pre-historic creatures that stretch out over half a mile.

Layover passengers can cycle along the Changi Airport Connector cycling path that links to Singapore’s wider park connector network and visit beaches, Bedok Jetty – a popular fishing spot, the East Coast Lagoon Hawker Centre and nearby residential neighborhoods

To make it easy to explore Singapore on a layover, the airport has mapped out four different routes lasting two to six hours and provides pay-per-use shower facilities by the bike return point.

Want to go for a bike ride on your Changi Airport layover?

To take advantage of Changi Airport’s free bike rentals, you’ll need to have a layover of at least 5 1/2 hours but less than 24 hours between flights.

Advance reservations for free bike rentals at Singapore’s Changi Airport are available here.

(Photos courtesy Changi Airport Group)

Now at Changi Airport: dinosaurs and glamping

Singapore’s Changi Airport doesn’t have many passengers flying in or out of its amenity-filled terminals right now. But creative holiday-themed landside activities are making sure the airport remains a desirable destination.

In Terminal 3 visitors will encounter T-rex and other dinosaurs, a two-story snow luge, and a ‘snowfall’ experience.

In Terminal 4, one of the seasonal attractions is a dinosaur-themed go-kart track.

Glamping at Jewel

Over in the Jewel entertainment and retail complex that is home to the Rain Vortex, there’s an overnight glamping experience.

Tents are pitched on the attraction’s highest level next to ficus trees decorated with fairy lights. And on the ground level, in the Shiseido Forest Valley, there are tents set up right next to the Rain Vortex.

Doesn’t it look like a lovely place to spend the night?

Airport attractions we miss: Changi Airport

As we enter another week of staying off the road and close to home, we find ourselves missing the fun of hanging out in airports that go the extra mile to make the terminals enjoyable.

With lots of greenery and gardens, cool shops and restaurants and plenty of entertaining art, Singapore’s Changi Airport is one of the best.

Here are just a few of Changi’s treasures we look forward to seeing on a future trip.

A Million Times at Changi

Kinetic Rain sculpture

Light & Sound Show – Rain Vortex at Jewel Changi Airport

What airport attractions are you missing?

Frivolous fountains as entertainment, attraction and investment

Those over the top fountains, waterfalls and other grand features found at hotels, malls and parks are quite snazzy – and expensive. But are they making natural attractions seem boring? Here’s our story that appeared first on CNBC.

If you visit Las Vegas and make your way to the Fountains of Bellagio, the Mirage volcano or any of the five curious and creative water features at City Center, you’ll see great examples of natural elements being used to create over-the-top entertainment.

Each experience is part of a portfolio of more than 200 unique installations around the world created by LA-based WET, a design firm that has been perfecting its techniques and pushing the boundaries of art, technology and attraction for more than 35 years.

Courtesy WET Design

“We do one-off features with new and unusual stuff that no one’s ever seen or done before,” said Jim Doyle, WET’s director of Design Technology. And like the cauldron it created for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City and the showpiece it created for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia in 2014, many of WET’s project are big and boutique projects that people talk about, take pictures of and share on Instagram and Facebook, said Doyle.

Photo by Harriet Baskas

The 130-foot-tall Rain Vortex is the newest example of WET’s work. Now the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, the Rain Vortex serves as the centerpiece of the Jewel shopping, dining and entertainment complex designed by Moshe Safde’s architecture firm for Singapore’s Changi Airport.

For Jewel, WET figured out how to create and build a circular waterfall that drops seven stories from the roof of the building.  

“It’s the first time something like this has appeared in the middle of a building,” said Doyle, “There’s nothing in there that is standard.”

Impressive enough during the day, at night the rain vortex, plus some man-made fog, creates a canvas for a first-of-its kind, 360-degree projected light-and-sound-show.

WET’s water features aren’t just meant to be pretty, said Doyle, “They become works of art, but they are also serious investments put where they’ll capture attention. You’re not going to spend money on a water feature no one will see or that doesn’t have a reason for being there.”

Courtesy WET Design

In Dubai, where bigger is always better, WET created the Dubai Fountain, the world’s tallest choreographed fountain.

Located next to the Dubai Mall, one of the world’s largest malls, and Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, the $240 million fountain project has jets that launch water a record-setting 50 stories high, with more than 1,000 individually programmable elements.

“They needed something to give people a reason to come back to the building and to the shops and the restaurants in the mall time and time again,” said Doyle, “That required a very large performance feature we could continually update so that people could walk out of the building, watch a show or two, sit down for dinner, watch another show and then go back into the mall and spend more money.”

Do high-tech attractions with natural elements make “real” attractions seem boring?

While millions of travelers may flock to high-tech attractions such as the dancing light and water fountains in Dubai and Las Vegas, travel experts don’t seem to be worried that much-loved low-tech and natural attractions will seem boring by comparison and become overlooked.

“There is manmade and then there is manmade magnificent,” said Jean Newman Glock, managing director of Signature Travel Network, “The pyramids of Giza are and will always be a destination that Las Vegas could replicate but not replace. It’s the in-situ aspect – the desert that fills all your senses with the heat and arid sands of the nearby Sahara – that the Luxor [hotel] just can’t get quite right.”

Lynn Minnaert, a clinical associate professor with the Tisch Center of Hospitality at New York University who visited both Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon last year, agrees.

“A lot of things we treasure as tourists, like Rome’s Trevi Fountain, are low-tech and man-made,  said Minnaert, “And while sometimes people travel purely for entertainment, those technologically-enhanced features that may be spectacular and nice to look can sometimes turn people off because they’re easily duplicated.”

High-tech attractions can add flair and a sense of place to casinos, malls, hotels and spaces that weren’t built to be authentic, said Minnaert. But natural attractions, such as the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park, don’t need anything added. Those places will never be boring, said Minnaert “And are beautiful as is.”

Watch: Light & sound show at Jewel Changi Airport

Greetings from Singapore

Jewel, the new over-the-top attraction at Changi Airport, hasn’t officially opened to the public. But thanks to ticketed previews for local residents and, of course, all the media reports, word has been getting around.

The venue is part mall, with 280 swank and unusual shops and restaurants, and part forest theme-park, with the world’s largest indoor waterfall right in the center.

The flow of the waterfall and the size of the droplets can be controlled. And somewhow each evening the water becomes a screen upon which two different 360-degree light & sound shows are projected each evening.

Take a look.

This video is courtesy of Changi Airport. I took a video too during one of the preview nights, but there were so many thousands of people and cameras in front of me that my version features the back of someone’s bald head.