FÁILTE IRELAND has announced plans for its biggest ever advertising campaign in a bid to encourage more people to holiday at home this year.
The €4 million campaign with the slogan “The Fun Starts Here” will begin next week and will continue throughout the year, concentrating on different markets and activities at different times of the year.
Fáilte Ireland chief executive Shaun Quinn said the campaign was important because last year was a “very, very difficult year” and this year was going to be “a pretty challenging season, particularly on the international front”.
He said the home market now accounted for 65 per cent of business in hotels so “keeping the home market ticking over and hopefully growing is terribly important to us”.
The campaign will include television advertisements, cinema and radio advertising, newspaper and online marketing. The broadcast advertising will be accompanied by a song Remember When by The Heathers, a young Clare band.
The campaign also includes the revamping of Fáilte Ireland’s Discover Ireland website. It was used in the planning of more than one- third of home holidays last year.
A campaign promoting festivals will be launched in April and a campaign aimed at encouraging older people to take up new activities will begin in May. Fáilte Ireland said the “golden years” and “golden oldies” promotions had worked well in the past but were now “a huge turn-off” to the older holidaymakers.
Fáilte Ireland’s director of market development, John Concannon, said this was the biggest campaign undertaken by the tourism development agency and it was the first time it had run a 90 second advertisement in the cinema.
“The reason we are using cinema is that cinema admissions are actually up at the moment,” he said. “People are using cinema to get away to escape, and this is the right mindset we think to push the idea of holidays.”
The recession had made holidays more important than ever to people, he said, and the campaign capitalised on this. “People want to have fun – that is the big emotional driver.”
Irish people took about 500,000 fewer holidays last summer but foreign holidays were hardest hit. According to Central Statistics Office data, Irish people took 85,000 fewer home holidays last year compared with 2008 while the number of foreign holidays fell by 331,000 in the same period.
Mr Concannon said research had found that people were not planning to take more foreign holidays this year but there was a 5 per cent increase in the number of people planning to take a home break. The vast majority of people (78 per cent) said they would choose their holiday based on interesting things to see and do.
Mr Concannon said the people were booking holidays much later than previously and were increasingly using the internet to book holidays. Research found 49 per cent of people perceived Ireland as a good value destination in early 2008, compared with 61 per cent at the end of last year.
Research found that avoiding air and sea travel was seen as the main advantage of a home break while the bad weather was seen as the main disadvantage of holidaying at home.
