This week a tourism chief revealed that half our tourists were less thanthrilled by Ireland. Bord Fáilte says the figures don't tell the wholestory. Hoteliers say it's proof of a crisis, writes Lorna Siggins
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my work, ye mighty, and despair!
John Travers, interim chairman of the National Tourism Development Authority, caused despair himself this week when he addressed Ireland's hoteliers in Galway. Not for his concluding quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, but for his remarks on visitors' reactions to their holidays here.
Some 56 per cent of visitors to Ireland last year described their experience as "fair, poor or very poor", he told the annual conference of the Irish Hotels Federation. About 80 per cent of Germans, Dutch and Italians were disappointed. Travers said he was quoting from last year's as-yet- unpublished Bord Fáilte visitor-attitude survey.
The survey findings, together with increasing dissatisfaction about value for money, should "certainly prick any bubble of complacency that exists in regard to the challenges facing Irish tourism", he noted. And tourism is a key industry, with one in 16 employees working in the area. His remarks, reported in this newspaper, put executives back at Bord Fáilte's Dublin headquarters into a tailspin. Hadn't the latest research given a very positive picture, overall, of Irish tourism last year?
To their knowledge, the negative reaction related only to questions about value for money. According to board sources, a quick perusal of Travers's text identified the problem.
Several key words that would have pointed this out had been unwittingly omitted, they said.
Bord Fáilte stresses that visitors are still highly satisfied with their holidays here, and only 6 per cent of those questioned last year said Ireland did not live up to their expectations.
"Friendliness/hospitality" and the landscape are still identified as the two key positive factors, contributing to a 93 per cent satisfaction rate, it says.
This point was raised by one of the speakers at the hoteliers' conference. Michael Rosney from Killarney warned that the traditional céad míle fáilte was being forgotten about in the drive towards a systems-driven, computer- literate service.
Bord Fáilte acknowledges that the positive attributes are being undermined by increasing concerns about the cost of living and value for money.
"Put it like this: the continental Europeans have been rating Ireland less favourably for a number of years in value-for-money terms," says Malcolm Connolly, the board's director of corporate development.
"The introduction of the euro has made people more sensitive to prices everywhere in the eurozone, and this may be a factor. However, in the last 12 months US and British visitors have also been identifying it. That is worrying, because it hadn't been an issue with these markets before, due to the position of the dollar and the strength of sterling."
Bord Fáilte conducts two principal surveys during the year: one of travellers, which it carries out continuously at air and sea ports, and the more specific visitor-attitudes survey, which involves interviews and written questionnaires between April and September, this time only with tourists.
The board interviews about 10,000 travellers for the first survey and receives more than 5,000 replies for the second. As Travers pointed out in Galway, visitors' holiday experiences met or exceeded expectations in well over 90 per cent of cases. About 30 per cent of them said their holidays were better than expected.
Satisfaction with accommodation was also generally high, he said. A hospitality survey for last year by CERT, the tourism training authority, showed that 77 per cent of visitors were "well satisfied" with where they stayed, although Travers noted that visitors from mainland Europe were less happy than those from Britain and North America.
The hoteliers emphasised their shrinking margins and made a strong case for Government intervention to reduce their value-for-money costs, including insurance, VAT and local-authority rates. The general pricing issue is a significant concern for both the home and foreign visitor, however, with eating out, the price of drink in pubs, hotels and restaurants, and the price of goods and services being the key factors.
Irish national income may be the fifth highest in the EU, ahead of Germany's, but Irish employees bear some of the heaviest consumption taxes in the 30 OECD countries. A recent survey of supermarket prices by BBC Good Food magazine showed that Ireland ranked with Sweden as the most expensive country in Europe.
In Travers's view, how Irish tourism addresses this increasingly negative perception will be a "major instrument of change" for the industry in the future. His advice to hoteliers was to take responsibility: "Competitiveness and the provision of value for money is not a problem for somebody else to solve."
He also urged them to talk to customers, using the information to lobby for change, and advised them to develop a "product offering" that compensates for price with quality and service.
Bleak future? Hoteliers fear the effects of war in Iraq
"I know we should be looking at it from a humanitarian point of view, but from a business perspective I don't even want to think about a war in Iraq," says Tom Randles, owner of three hotels in Kerry and west Cork.
"We've come through the aftermath of September 11th and the foot-and- mouth scare, and this year was beginning to look quite positive," he says. "But Iraq will have a big bearing on how the season goes."
Randles, right, was echoing the views of many of his colleagues at the annual conference of the Irish Hotels Federation, in Galway. By the time the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, arrived, the hoteliers' strong case for Government help had been well made on the airwaves.
The Minister acknowledged the Budget's 1 per cent increase in VAT for hotels and restaurants until 2004 had caused difficulties for the industry but emphasised that there had been a 4 per cent reduction in corporation tax. He said he would continue to try to get a fair deal on VAT.
But the federation wants a deferral of the VAT increase, a freeze on local-authority rates for hotels at 2002 levels and a removal of the 2 per cent Government levy on insurance premiums.
And it feels the Government has forgotten about an industry that employs some 140,000 people.
"You can never drop standards, and yet the bar is being raised all the time and our margins are getting tighter and tighter," says Randles. "Hoteliers and guesthouse owners always get a bashing, but we employ a lot of people and the Government is just not helping us."
Kathleen O'Regan Sheppard, owner of Kathleen's Country House in Killarney, says her business was down by 31 per cent last year because of September 11th and foot-and-mouth; another uncertain year will put an inordinate squeeze on small hotels and guesthouses, she says.
"The increase in VAT in the Budget was a severe blow," she says. "What a lot of people don't understand is that we do a lot of business in the spring. That VAT increase is not something we are in a position to pass on to the customer."
A former vice-president of the federation, O'Regan Sheppard is secretary of its Kerry branch and a director of Cork Kerry Tourism and Kerry Airport. She knows what people in the business are facing and feels shrinking margins will harm quality.
"It is time now to give incentives to the small operator, because I know of some that are already in trouble as we speak.
"In general, there has been a very high satisfaction rate with Ireland, and so much of our business is attracted by word of mouth. So we need to mind what we have."