Tourism Ireland today launched details of its marketing plans to promote Ireland overseas in 2016 at an event attended by Tourism Minister Paschal Donohoe and tourism industry leaders from around the country.
The organisation aims to surpass this year’s record performance in overseas tourism and to welcome 8.2 million visitors to Ireland in 2016. This figure will represent growth of +4% over 2015 and deliver €4.4 billion to the Irish economy (almost +5%) next year.
To illustrate how much Irish tourism has bounced back since the downturn, a comparison of CSO figures for January to October 2015 versus the same period in 2010 shows superb growth in visitors from Britain (+20% in that five-year period), North America (+51%), Mainland Europe (+38%) and Australia and developing markets (+66%).
"The overall tourism goal of government – as expressed in our tourism policy statement – is that by 2025, revenue from overseas visitors, excluding carrier receipts, will increase to €5 billion net of inflation," said Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Paschal Donohoe.
"We aim to have 10 million visits to Ireland annually by 2025 and 250,000 people employed in the tourism sector, compared to 205,000 at present.
"In August I appointed a new tourism leadership group, which will identify the specific actions required over the period 2016-2018 in order to achieve the longer-term goals in the tourism policy statement. These actions will be contained in a tourism action plan to be published early next year.”
Source: www.businessworld.ie
