As of to-day there is no sign of any recovery in an Irish tourism industry which has been in freefall for more than a year.
Visitor arrivals in February were a whopping 24% down on the same month of last year and come on top of an even worse performance in January when the decline was 31%. It is also of grim significance that the figures for January and February 2009 were already well down on those of 2008 when tourism was still buoyant.

The CSO figures show that in the first two months of 2010, almost 219,000 fewer people visited Ireland than a year earlier, so even allowing for those who would have stayed with friends and relations, this amounts to some 400,000 fewer bednights sold to overseas visitors than was the case a year ago. Add in lost sales of meals, drinks, visitor attraction tickets, transport fares and pub drinks and it amounts to a serious setback for an already under-pressure industry.

The response by Tourism Minister Mary Hanafin was to blame everything from the weather to Ireland playing two big rugby games away from home.

‘The particularly adverse weather conditions discouraged many from making travel plans. Indeed many countries issued severe weather warnings advising against any unnecessary travel....Continuing economic uncertainty in these months in Britain and Europe was also a factor. It is important to realise that February visitors account for only about 6% of the annual total. Factors such as the Six Nations rugby match being played in Paris this year, rather than Dublin, can also have a big impact on incoming visitors in a low season month such as February’, she said.
Some of these excuses may be plausible, but they will bring little consolation to hoteliers, restaurateurs or other tourism providers who are staring at bleak accounts for the first quarter of 2010.

The fact is that we all knew that this was coming and marketing efforts around the St. Patrick’s Festival, such as floodlighting London Eye and Sydney Harbour Bridge in green, were too late to have any early-year impact. Our tourism industry is suffering principally because people all over the world have less money in their pockets and in Great Britain, which is by far our biggest market, we have become a very expensive destination because of the strength of the euro against sterling.

The figures for arrivals from Britain over the past year make for depressing reading. Arrivals last year were down 16% and spending fell by 24%. Given the size of this market (it delivered 3.75m visitors in 2008) percentage falls on this scale are catastrophic.

Any recovery in our tourism fortunes must therefore include a fairly massive recovery of the British market and this is where our energies should be directed. To-date the strategy has been to spend money on promotions. Tourism Ireland has been given a sizeable budget and no doubt it is spending the money wisely.  We have also been creative in launching the free travel scheme for senior citizens visiting here, although it is a pity that Failte Ireland and CIE did not go the ‘full nine yards’ to include travel on buses, the LUAS and the DART.  As the scheme stands, qualifying visitors can only get to towns and cities served by the rail network, which excludes hundreds of places which sorely need tourism revenue. It is also true that Ireland now represents better value for all visitors because of the much lower hotel rates and meal prices which the recession has generated,

On the other side of the coin we are adding to the cost of an Irish holiday with the ridiculous €10 airport tax and by giving Dublin Airport Authority the green light to raise their charges up to €9.32 this year and up to €10.44 next year in order to pay for Terminal 2. (The current maximum rate is €7.39 per passenger).  While this measure may be needed in order to keep DAA solvent, it is hard to see, from a tourism viewpoint, the sense of making visitors pay more because they are arriving in fewer numbers. Surely the opposite would make marketing sense.
Even though January and February account for only around 6% of annual visitor arrivals, the returns show a very disappointing trend and will make the task of Tourism Ireland in achieving its declared target of a 3% growth in visitor numbers this year, all the more difficult.