Tourism interests in Galway are hoping that the 25th annual arts festival will give a fillip to a flagging season, attracting business which they hope will continue into Galway Races week and beyond.
The two-week festival opens on July 15th, and a bed is almost impossible to come by in the city during this period.
The same beds will be filled again for Galway Races during the first few days of August, and the city barely draws its breath before the oyster festivals in both Galway and Clarenbridge attract yet more custom.
Out in Roundstone, in Connemara, the annual arts event is in full swing, with events focusing on youth and the environment up until Sunday.
"Challenging", "patchy" and "downright slow" are the expressions most frequently applied to the current tourism season in the western region. The downturn in US business has been mirrored to some extent by a significant fall-off in visitors from Germany, but those operators who anticipated problems are taking an optimistic approach.
Mr Charles Sinnott, owner of the Connemara Gateway Hotel in Oughterard, Co Galway, said that his hotel groups had invested heavily in advertising in the home and Northern Ireland markets after September 11th, with positive results. June had been an exception this year, due to the World Cup, he said. "The US and German markets are well down, and that is generally known, but we hope to replace this with Irish business, north and south, and a growth in the British market."
Pricing was a factor of which most people were aware. "There has been a high concentration on this, and we have offers out at the moment which are lower in price than last year," he said. At the same time, insurance costs had "gone through the roof" in the past two years, and every operator had to take this into account.
For some, even the aftermath of September 11th couldn't match the unexpected nature of last year's foot-and-mouth crisis. "I am not sure that we match the national figure of a 40 per cent drop in US visitors," said Ms Anne Melia of Ireland-West Tourism. "I would put it at a 30 per cent drop. The British market is holding its own, and the self-catering sector is up by 12 to 16 per cent on last year."
Self-catering is a "very strong product", Ms Melia said, and the home holiday business drawn in from the North and Britain was also performing well.
Extensive marketing campaigns had been carried out by many hotels, and this had paid off, she believed.
