Meet the Team: Edward Ong, Manager, Sales, Marina Bay Sands

 

29-year-old Edward clinched Emerging Talent of the Year at the Singapore MICE Awards

 

Richard Ireland, SACEOS President, and Yap Chin Siang, Singapore Tourism Board Deputy Chief Executive (Special Duties), present Marina Bay Sands’ Edward Ong with the Emerging Talent of the Year award

 

Edward Ong is one of the youngest members of the Sales Team at Marina Bay Sands. He joined the integrated resort upon graduation in 2018 and has undergone multiple rotations under the management training programme. In this interview, he shares about his experience in the Sales team and the various projects he has managed.

 

1. What led you to this role?

I’m relatively new to the Sales team, having joined in October 2022 from the Special Events & Exhibition team. I was part of the management training programme – an 18-month programme that allowed me to explore different divisions in MICE. This allowed me to have a deeper understanding of how the industry works and piqued my interest in exploring this industry further.

 

2. How do you push boundaries in your work?

One of the key events I handled was Ecosperity and had to think about how to elevate the event experience in terms of sustainability. One of the things that we considered was our catering offerings and we went all the way down to examine individual ingredients to see whether we could procure them from sustainable sources.

Separately, I worked on Mediacorp’s Star Awards last year. One of the areas in which I pushed boundaries was the red carpet event along the Marina Bay waterfront. Our Event Plaza is a complex space as it’s a publicly accessible area. Staging a red carpet event with high profile celebrities posed a challenge because we had to look into how to execute the event smoothly without interfering with the day-to-day operations of the resort. We worked with our events company and security department to come up with a security operations plan to better manage the flow of the celebrities and the dispersal of the crowd.

 

3. How important is sustainability to young professionals in your industry?

Apart from reading the news to keep myself updated, the company also sends me for regular trainings, including the Events Industry Council’s Sustainable Events Professional Certification. This enables me to dive into sustainability initiatives and offer greater perspective when I engage my clients on sustainability.

 

(Photo courtesy of SACEOS)