My day

Barbara Wood speaks to SANDRA O'CONNELL

I LOOK AFTER the German, Austrian and Swiss markets, and am based in Frankfurt. I arrived here in April after spending the previous six years in Madrid. I still miss my friends and my life there, but I’m enjoying the change too.

I walk to work each morning. It takes about 25 minutes and the fresh air is so good for your humour. I’m in by 9am and the first job is to check e-mails. We are an hour ahead of Dublin and are a global organisation, so there is always loads to sort through.

I write a to-do list every evening for the next day and I try to work through that methodically.

A lot of what I do is partner liaison, talking to tour operators and keeping in touch. The German market is very different in that 30 per cent of them will book through a tour operator when coming to Ireland, as opposed to say just 8 per cent of Spanish.

Actually, the Germans love Ireland, the landscape in particular, but also the culture and the people. They are big into Irish music and festivals and at the moment we are also promoting “Icons of Ireland”, such as the Cliffs of Moher, Clonmacnoise and Newgrange to encourage them to visit.

A lot of my day is spent talking to airlines too, putting the case for more direct flights, not just by Ryanair and Aer Lingus but Lufthansa and German Wings too.

For lunch I seem to be still on Spanish time in that I eat late, at about 2pm. We have a kitchen here and bring in our own food. There are 15 people on the team, split between Irish and Germans, and there’s a lovely atmosphere.

Much of the afternoon will be spent in conference call meetings. My direct manager is in London. I’ll also head out to meet with Irish hotel owners or sales and marketing departments and to make sales calls on tour operators.

I finish up about 7.30pm and either go to the gym or, twice a week, to German lessons.

I travel a lot too, mainly to Berlin. The way I see it is that I have the best of both worlds in that I live abroad, but get to talk to Irish people daily, and I get to go home a lot too.

It’s a great job in that it’s very easy to sell something – in this case Ireland – that you are genuinely proud of.

Barbara Wood is manager, central Europe, for Tourism Ireland