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New Zealand tourism leaders last Friday heard how Ireland has successfully driven regional dispersal of tourism, spreading the benefits of tourism more widely across the country while taking pressure off historical tourism hot spots.
Paul Kelly, CEO of Ireland’s national tourism development authority Fáilte Ireland, spoke at the Otago Tourism Policy School in Queenstown.
He showed delegates a heat map of Ireland, which shows that between 2017 and 2023, the number of tourists visiting traditional go-to places in the South of Ireland have been redistributed throughout the country.
It is in stark contrast to discussions at the Tourism Policy School on Thursday last week, focusing on a lack of social licence for tourism in communities in Queenstown and the Mackenzie District, where locals are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of tourism on their own backyards.
Ireland’s secret to success was due to having a national tourism development authority tasked with developing tourism across the entire country.
Paul says Fáilte Ireland put its energies in to working with communities where tourist numbers were low, to help make them more attractive to tourists.
They split the entire country into four tourism brands – Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland’s Hidden heartlands, Ireland’s Ancient East and Dublin.
Fáilte Ireland worked with places like Athlone, a town in the centre of Ireland, where the Shannon River – Ireland’s longest river – flows through, to develop a network of walking and cycling trails, together with growing a river cruise industry to help attract tourists.
An additional benefit is that it has helped improve the situation in some of the country’s tourist hot spots where they were beginning to see pushback from local communities experiencing negative impacts as a result of growing tourism.
“While the focus was on growing tourism in the underdeveloped areas, with hindsight it took the pressure off the busy regions,” Paul says.
The plan was also backed by significant finance with Fáilte Ireland’s annual budget of €150 million.
“There was a lot of capital investment and marketing in order to spread the distribution of tourists and that’s where a national organisation, rather than a regional organisation can have success,” Paul says.
“We were able to invest proportionally more in under-staffed areas in order to achieve this.”
Keeping the people of Ireland top of mind was always key to the success of the turnaround, he says.
Unemployment has been a huge problem, and a focus on getting the Irish into hospitality and tourism jobs was a key focus of the work his organisation was doing.
In 2023, as a result of both international and domestic tourism, the tourism spend in Ireland was €10 billion with 226,000 jobs.
Tourism industry, government and research leaders gathered at the Otago Tourism Policy School in Queenstown over April 3-4 to problem solve the pressing concern of effectively resourcing New Zealand’s tourism system.
Demand from key tourism stakeholders to attend this year’s forum, organised by the University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka’s Department of Tourism, is the highest since the annual event began seven years ago.
School co-director Associate Professor Susan Houge Mackenzie says the current system is insufficiently resourced, and regional tourism organisations want to see national leadership to help enable regional destination management plans and initiatives.
