It's all smiles as 'Ireland of the welcomes' reopens for business

At Fáilte Ireland’s annual tourism fair, an industry fallen on hard times resells itself to overseas operators

WANT SOME good news? We Irish are really rather nice. Superficially and most of the time, anyway. The Italians like us because they think we are a lot like them – easy-going, lively, young in spirit. The Danes compare us favourably to the Thais – smiling, friendly, service-minded – “I don’t think I’ve ever met an unfriendly Irish person,” says one. The French deem us to be welcoming and they like our nice, safe country.

Were these people on mind-altering substances? In fact, they were hard-nosed foreign tour operators participating in a tourism trade fair in Dublin’s Burlington Hotel this week. An annual event sponsored by Fáilte Ireland and titled Meitheal, it attracted nearly 300 overseas operators from five continents, here to haggle and – chief among this year’s tasks – discover if the Irish have addressed the rip-off factor.

About 300 Irish “tourism product providers” paid €400-€600 each to buy a few minutes with the foreigners. It looks a lot like speed-dating: the foreign representative is anchored at a small table, the Irish seller has 15 minutes to make his pitch before a voice booms over the big function room that time is up, whereupon the fast-talker must make way for the next. It’s lunchtime on day two and some of the foreigners look a tad dazed, unsurprisingly. Over two days, well over 7,000 such appointments take place. It is the biggest tourist trade event of the year and gets little wider attention, which irks industry people. After all, they say, the tourism and hospitality sector generates more than €6 billion a year in revenue and employs an estimated 250,000 people – as many as the fabled construction industry ever did.

For anyone expecting the corpse of Irish tourism to be waked in the lobby, the surprising aspect is the hugely energetic buzz throughout the hotel.

Brian McColgan, the chairman of Abbey Tours, a 30-year-old company that brought in nearly 100,000 tourists last year, smiles the wry smile that says “do not be deceived”. This year is about survival. He characterises the buzz as the euphoria of industry people released from their bunkers and allowed to mingle in one big barter session.

For Irish tourism, 2007 was the annus mirabilis, when the booming home market – which had grown by 40 per cent in seven years – peaked and merged with overseas visitors piling in with their holiday money.

No more. For 2009, McColgan can already predict that US business will be down 20-40 per cent; British business is stagnant, and the European market is slightly down. Tough times are already here; last-minute bookings are a brand new, torturous feature of the market and if some areas are holding up, it’s at a price. “It’s about customers, cash and costs,” says Jane Magnier, managing director of Abbey Tours.

The word this week was that desperate hoteliers were paring prices back to 2002 levels. One operator said that prices were down by up to 25 per cent in some cases. “Haggling,” says Shaun Quinn, chief executive of Fáilte Ireland, “is a whole new experience. There is a realisation on both sides that things got out of hand, across the board.” He denies any industry profiteering, however: “Six or seven years ago, 25 per cent of average hotel costs was staff; now it’s 45-50 per cent in some cases.”

Whatever the cause, the foreign-based operators have no doubt there was overcharging and a native snootiness towards the industry during the boom.

“We did lose the plot for a few years,” says Seamus Moloughney, an Irishman running Emerald Travel in Melbourne, Australia. “What brought this country out of the recession was tourism but then we turned our backs on tourists, ‘we don’t need you, we’re rich ourselves now’. We stopped giving service – but tourism is built on service. And charging rates like €300-€350 for a game of golf was beyond the beyond. That led to the perception that everything here is dear. It’s not. Farmhouses, BBs, car hire are as well priced as anywhere. From what I see this week, it seems we’re coming back to where we should be in price.”

Peter Grinsted, the managing director of Danish golf tour operators Green2Green, dealt with stratospheric green fees in the boom years by directing his clients to the small, local clubs – “where you have a better atmosphere and get to meet the Irish” – rather than the five-star resorts. It started when an intended trip to Adare Manor was somehow diverted to the more modest Adare golf club: “We were carried on a pillow through their front door and that was a marvellous experience.” He also sees a new realism. “Even the Royal Dublin,” he says, “has changed. Visitors used to be put in a bleak windowless part; now at least they’re allowed to look at the members.”

And then there was the building boom. Gilles Lainé of Brittany Ferries is mystified by the apartment blocks on Clifden’s Sky Road in Connemara. “Bizarre,” he shrugs. “It’s amazing they have the right to build in such places.”

“The Celtic Tiger was no friend to tourism,” says Jim Deegan of Railtours Ireland. “We became too busy; tourism slid down the pecking order. Tourists were only getting in the way of us getting in the way of ourselves – whether it was roads, airports or public transport. We started losing the welcome. We were meeting customers who were saying ‘You’re the first Irish we’ve met’. Now you see people going out of their way because they’re appreciative again.”

On the issue of the frosty fáilte, Shaun Quinn believes “it was partly because more international staff were being employed, but there was also an age factor. Women who were working in the home and wanted a part-time job in the industry were fantastic, even if their confidence was a bit low. Where you had teenagers or younger employees, that’s where you got the frosty fáilte. Maybe we all needed a jolt.”

THE BUZZ WORDS are a new commitment to service and welcome, creativity in engaging tourists, who are now younger in profile and want to get off the coach for an authentic Irish experience, and – above all – value for money. While hotels have been willing to drop package prices, the same cannot be said for everyday costs such as the pint and the cappuccino. The cost of living repeatedly features as the number one negative for tourists; it was the primary concern for one in three German visitors in 2008 and for one in five holidaymakers overall. “A cappuccino should be €1-€1.75, like in Italy,” says Brian McColgan of Abbey Tours. “Here it’s €3.75. Two pints cost over a tenner. You’ll pay nearly €7 for a sandwich in some places.”

As for creativity, Magnier reels off a list of entrepreneurs who have pulled out the stops to engage with tourists. Only Americans care about leprechauns and Waterford Glass any more, she says. German and French tourists, for example, won’t care a fig about the Blarney Stone but they will love Causey Farm in Co Meath, where they can be Irish for a day, learning to dance and cut turf; or pulling pints in the Brazen Head; or making brown bread in Ballyknocken House in Co Wicklow; or sheep shearing on Kissane sheep farm on the Ring of Kerry. “These people will do anything to give the customers what they want and that’s something that’s coming back into the Irish psyche,” says Magnier happily.

The happy voice vanishes, however, when she turns to “the OPW issue” – the Government body that runs such tourist magnets as the Hill of Tara interpretative centre, Kilmainham Gaol, Kilkenny Castle, Muckross House – where “every site runs its own little fiefdom” regarding opening hours, tour sizes, booking arrangements. Kilmainham, for example, failed to open a bookings diary until late February and then told operators they were fully booked for April. “The Tara interpretative centre would normally open in the middle of May; now they’re not opening until the beginning of June – but we’ve already sold that to our partners. No one seems to worry about budgets or accountability to anyone. This state needs to get over itself and open for business.”

In the meantime, it’s good to remember that we are not doing too badly. Eight in every 10 visitors say they would unreservedly recommend Ireland to others. And only 15 per cent mentioned the weather.