How do overseas tour operators sell holidays to Ireland? Rosita Boland finds out what visitors want.
Well, the good news is that tourist numbers are picking up again. We had 6.2 million overseas visitors last year, up 300,000 on 2002. The bad news is that we are very far down the Japanese wish list of European places to visit.
Ireland has been selling itself as a holiday destination to the world for decades. Monday will see the 30th annual Ireland Travel Trade Workshop in the RDS, organised by Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland, where hundreds of tour operators from around the world come to do business. These operators will be selling Irish holidays in their home countries. New countries at the workshop this year will be Korea, India and Poland. Last year, tourism was worth €5.1 billion to Ireland.
The British market alone brings in €1.3 billion. Bill Maxwell is the director of the Leeds office of Wallace Arnold Tours which carries 600,000 tourists a year to Ireland, most of those in the 55-plus age bracket.
"Our biggest problem in selling Ireland at the moment is pricing," Maxwell says. "Prices have become more transparent now since Ireland joined the euro. We can buy bed nights cheaper in Italy or France thawe can in Ireland." Their tours are packages, with meals included, so tourists wouldn't necessarily notice the prices; but the operators do. Their most popular tour is a week, with two nights in Dublin, then across to Galway and Killarney. So what do British people want when they come to Ireland?
"The Irish welcome would always have been very important. People in the hotels or bars asking how the day was. But from accounts we're hearing now, it seems like there are a lot of different foreign accents now in these places. I don't quite know how to put it, but it's not really an Irish welcome any more, since these people aren't Irish."
Tommasso Trapani is the general manager for Boscola Tours, an Italian tour company with a head office in Padua. "In the last four years, Ireland has really taken off," he reports. "We have 10,000 visitors a year there now. We call the Irish people the Mediterranean of the North."
It does sound a little unlikely, but apparently the Italians think our food is excellent - those Irish stews in particular. So there is a reason why you keep finding that dish on menus, even on the hottest summer day. The Italians who come here through Boscola Tours are mostly 40-plus. They are keen on seeing Belfast and the most popular tour is one which takes in Dublin, the Ring of Kerry, Galway, Inis Mór, Donegal and Belfast, and which starts at €1,600. They too have noticed how expensive Ireland is in comparison to other euro-currency countries.
Japanese man Mark Takayanagi has been running Miki Travel in Dublin for three years, through which he sells tours to the Japanese people back home. It has not been easy, he admits frankly. Shortly after the Dublin office opened, foot-and-mouth hit, then there was SARS and the war in Iraq. "Japanese people are very naive. They knew Europe had something to do with the war, so they didn't want to come to Europe."
Currently only "a few thousand" Japanese tourists come to Ireland each year, most of them 60-plus. They prefer the quaintness of Windsor Castle and the pile of Buckingham Palace to our shiny Spire. And they love Italy - 200,000 of them visited there last year. "When you arrive in Dublin Airport, it doesn't look different to Japan, for instance," Takayanagi says. "In Rome, you know you are in Italy and then you see the Colosseum in the city. Dublin doesn't have anything like that. There isn't anything big and attractive in Ireland. We tell them Newgrange is 3,000 years old, older than the Pyramids. But when they get there, they compare it to the Pyramids and they are not that impressed."
What the Japanese do like is Inis Mór. They all want to go there and they all know about it, because pictures of a Japanese celebrity visiting it appeared in one of their national papers about six years ago.
So what kind of feedback does Takayanagi get from people who have been here? "There are two kinds of responses," he says bluntly. "One will be impressed. The other will not be impressed at all, and will say so. Those ones will never come back."
A few new pictures of Japanese celebrities in scenic locations could work wonders for the Irish tourist trade.