Page 070-071 Destination Ireland 14/01/2013 09:31 Page 1
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FEBRUARY 2013 PAGE 70
DESTINATION IRELAND FOYNES A new maritime museum showcasing the Shannon Estuary from Limerick City to the mouth of the estuary will open in the port village of Foynes in March
LIMERICK King John’s Castle visitor attractionis to open this year after a €5.7m redevelopment FÁILTE Ireland reports that domestic
trips are holding up in the firgures for 2012, there were 9m trips by Irish people in Ireland but the Irish are spending less, a total of €100m less in 2012. Shaun Quinn of Fáilte Ireland said the challenge for hotels is generating enough margin to reinvest in their property
SHANNON development says that 2012 visitor figures were up 3.5pc, banquets were up 2pc and day visitors up 3.7pc. Tourism revenues increased by 3.5pc
2,562 events were registered for the Gathering by mid-January, 800 more than at the official launch last month. Fáilte Ireland said they were confident they would hit their target of 325,000 extra visitors for the Gathering. SPIKE ISLAND A report by Scott Tallon Walker suggests that turning Spike Island into a tourist resort would cost €40m
The Gathering New Year’s eve festival has already been hailed as a success in worldwide media coverage
Market scare
DIASPORA Research by the Amárach company suggest that 60pc of USA diapsora considerting visiting Ireland in 2013 COTTAGES A portfolio of 450 cot-
tages in Ireland aee being launched this year by cottages4you
IRELAND finished seventh in Fly.com;s
annual New Year Travel Resolutions Survey taken in America behind number one sihed for sdestination Italy Australia (2), N Zealand (3), France (4), England (5), US (6) with Spain (8), Fiji (9) & S Africa (10)
TALL SHIP Sheffield Haslam Universities’ report for Dublin City Council detemrined that the Tall Ships festival was worth €30m for Dublin. A tosal of 1.25m attended, 27pc rest of Ire and 12pc overseas. PORTMAGEE has been announced as the first ever winner of Fáilte Ireland’s National Tourism Towns Award ITIC
Eamon McKeon CEO of the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation said he would be disappointed if we don’t get double digit growth from N America next year because of the proposed 20pc increase in seats. ITIC’s Review shows 6.5m visitors in 2012, Britain down 4pc, US & Europe both up 2pc, emerging markets up 4pc. British market fell from 5.0m in 2006 to 3.6m in 2011. Holiday trips are down from 1.8m to 1.0m average spend per visit (all types) down from £294 to £269, despite an increase in stay from 4.8 nights to 5.4.
FÁILTE Ireland reports that there were 12,000 more employed in the tourism industry in 2012, withthe figure rising to 185,000. Fáilte Ireland traditionally have a broader definition of the tourism than the CSO, who confine their figures to the hospitality and restaurant sector.
British inbound market set to shrink further in 2013
T
he arrival of new tourism figures is always the prelude for a past. The Central Statistics Office figures for three of the last four months in 2012 will make cheerful reading for some. Trips to Ireland were up 3.9pc, with North America up 19.7pc. But Britain was down 3pc. And in the statistical zone in which Irish tourism is trapped, that 3pc is very very bad news. Ireland’s dilemma is that, in the good times when marketing budgets were fat, we were lazy. We went for a dependency culture, instead of taking the alternative, trying to escape our addiction to four key markets, Britain, the US, France and Germany. Even spending time and energy building up the German market, which should have been an obvious thing to do, would have saved us from the dilemma in which we now are stuck. British figures are collapsing, not because we are doing anything inherently wrong, but because the British economy is going down the sinkhole. At the end of the year 2011, the last complete year for which we have figures, we had attracted 7.29m tourists to the island, (+4%), 3.6m from Britain (+0pc), 968,000 from North America (+6%), and 2.3m from
Mainland Europe (+9pc). The numbers from our third and fourth biggest markets, France (407,000, up from 356,000 in 2010) and Germany 432,000 (up from 399,000 in 2010) are only a fraction of what the British market was supplying. It s a long way back to Italy, then Spain, Scandinavia, Our total visitors from other areas were 395,0000 (+14pc), nearly half of them from Australia and New Zealand, , numbers that our crazy visa arrangements will prevent growing, not to mention our total inability to grasp the subtle requirements of the Russian, Brazilian, Mexican, Indian and Chinese inbound markets. The figures are not bad. Twenty years ago the target was 2m visitors and it took a long time to reach it. We could still be trying were it not for Ryanair. A look at our peer group shows how impressive the figures are, Norway attracted 2.7m visitors in 2011, Finland 3.8m, Sweden 4.9m Even Portugal got just 7.4m and Cyprus 2.4m. Faraway Australia, for all its size and stunning scenery, gets just 5.8m tourists and New Zealand 2.6m. Market share is the real indicator of our worth in these trying times. In 2011 we actually increased market share in Britain, to around 8pc in
2011, and still lost numbers. The problem is in 2012 that market share appears to be slipping, accelerating the slide in numbers in a shrinking market. While Irish people are enthusiastic travellers, our annual trips abroad exceeding our population by a factor of almost two, the Brits are not, taking fewer trips than their annual population annually. Which makes our failure to engage with Germany an even greater tragedy. Can you imagine if we had 8pc of the German market, instead of less than half a percent? It would mean an annual influx of 5m German speaking tourists flooding our hotels, B&Bs and guesthouses, dispersing wisely into the country side, much further than the end lounge of Temple Bar which is the limit of many of the existing tourists form our biggest inbound market. They would be hiking our mountains and cycling our cycling trails, if such a thing existed, even Mayo’s Greenways spills unsuspecting cyclists into the paths of dangerous traffic on windy country roads. To paraphrase a certain former female Tánaiste, in tourism terms it would be much, much wiser to have stayed closer to Berlin than Boston.