Tourism and the consumer: accommodation: In the grudge match between holidaymakers, and the domestic tourism sector, people are fed-up of Rip-Off Ireland, writes Kieran Fagan

Irish consumers are sick of paying more for fizzy water than for heavily-taxed alcohol in pubs, driving families aimlessly about the place in grey weather encountering daylight robbery twice a day for indifferent meals.

We look at the packages on offer in the sun resort brochures and bitterly resent ministers expressing satisfaction at tourism figures. It may be working for them, but it certainly is not working for us. Then we get a few sunny days and it is all forgotten - for a while.

At a recent Late Late Show special on tourism, the usual dialogue of the deaf took place. The hotels people pointed out all the money they had invested, the millions spent on swimming pools, gyms and saunas. The customers were not impressed. You are overcharging us.

As a goodwill gesture, the audience got free weekends in very posh hotels. Mine was at the Dunbrody House in Co Wexford, a stunning haute cuisine elegant country house hotel. Expensive, yes, good value yes, cheap no.

No use to a typical family, two parents, three children, who typically spend €1,200 to rent a house for a fortnight in the west of Ireland, and spend about the same on living expenses, having snacks on days out, but otherwise self-catering.

One good evening meal out costs €126. Virtually the same meal for the same family in Munich costs €60. We all have similar stories. There's something wrong here. So last week while the tourism industry queried the claimed 6 per cent increase in overall tourist numbers, this writer decided to see what was happening on the ground.

On Monday in Cork city, Jury's Inn charges €70 per night for a room which could comfortably sleep three. Charging by room rather than person does make sense.

In the city's tourist office on Tuesday at 10 a.m., staff outnumber customers by two to one.

Then to nearby Kinsale with its marina, its beautiful harbour setting, its easy access from one of the few human scale airports left on the tourist trail.

If Kinsale sneezes, the rest of the tourism sector has flu. Or worse. Walking around the town, on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, I am struck by the number of "vacancies" signs outside the bed and breakfast places.

Of the 10 I pass on my walk, only one has a no vacancies sign.

I go into one of Kinsale's leading hotels, the Trident, and do the naïve tourist bit, ask the cost of a stay, there and then. I'm offered three nights bed-and-breakfast and two dinners for two at just under €400.

Nearby another prestige hotel, Acton's, is offering the same deal minus dinners for €330.

I start to add up the costs in a guesthouse, say €35 - €50 per person per night, making €210 maybe up to €300 for two , think of the leisure facilities and other comforts that a hotel offers, and begin to understand the vacancies signs in the guesthouse sector.

The Dunbrody had clarified the essential difference between price and value - if you can afford it.

"That's just one strand of our business," Hal McElroy, managing director of the Trident tells me later.

"I don't see the same number of people on the streets, there isn't the same walk-in business of previous years. Some days we get up to 20 people in off the street looking for a room for the night, some days we might get none at all. Irish people are leaving it later and later to make up their minds."

He reckons that what he loses on the domestic swings, he makes up on the overseas roundabouts.

"We don't put all our eggs in one basket. We have overseas customers, loyal customers from Holland, France, Germany, Scandinavia, the United States, people who come for the deep sea fishing and the other attractions Kinsale offers, and we have corporate customers who keep us busy all year round."

He disputes the notion that overseas visitors numbers are up.

He doesn't disagree strongly with the notion that they may be down by 10 per cent, but says gains in the overseas markets are keeping the Trident on an even keel.

The bed-and-breakfast places are definitely feeling the pain.

"The walk-in business has vanished," says Mary O'Neill, proprietor of the Seagull House. She admits that she has been cutting prices - "for genuine people" - to get business. Some push their luck. She had five well-heeled visitors in looking for three rooms for €100 all told last week. She sent them packing.

Maureen Tierney has two guesthouses. Tierney's, a traditional one in the centre of town, has experienced an unheard of phenomenon, empty rooms in July.

Business is better at the new upscale Friar's Lodge, which looks more like a hotel to me.

"I don't think it started this year, there's been a gradual decline [in the traditional B&B] over the past couple of years. We should probably think of offering more, being a bit more competitive, perhaps."

She thinks that cheap holidays abroad are a good thing and that the domestic tourism providers like her have lessons to learn from them.