FÁILTE IRELAND Priorities in 2011

To support the Irish tourism industry to trade as best they can in the year ahead Fáilte Ireland plans to focus its investment support in the following key areas:

• Driving demand on the home holiday market – through a €4m 40-week intensive marketing campaign using a mixture of innovative marketing and an exciting mix of festivals, events and offers , Fáilte Ireland will continue to leverage all potential demand within the domestic market to create additional tourism activity, revenue and jobs;

• Expanding its business support network (by 50%) to more tourism businesses around the country. In particular, we will invest heavily in those services which will assist tourism businesses to increase their international customer base, with a particular emphasis on the British market.

• Investing through its capital investment programme to improve and broaden the appeal of Ireland’s portfolio of tourist attractions, activities and tourism related infrastructure. Last year, some 23 projects were approved for grant –aid totalling almost €40m and this investment effort will be continued through 2011 to ensure that Ireland is well place to take advantage of longer-term growth.

• Investing in significant business, sporting and cultural eventswhich offer good prospects for tourism growth in 2011. Particular emphasis will be placed on the business meetings and conferencing market where performance has been relatively strong.

Chairman of Fáilte Ireland, Mr O’Donoghue reinforced Fáilte Ireland’s commitment to developing tourism in 2011 -

“Tourism has a significant role to play in this country’s economic recovery. The key to growth lies in developing more overseas business thereby generating much needed foreign earnings and sustaining jobs. We have a good quality product, we have better infrastructure and we are better value than before. We know where our overseas target markets are and what needs to be done. This is the year we can turn things around.

In the year ahead we will need to push, pull and persist to grow tourism into recovery. We will work with our colleagues in Tourism Ireland to help them ‘push’ greater numbers of visitors to our shores and Fáilte Ireland will be working all year round to maximise all the necessary ‘pull’ factors – the full on experience of all there is to see and do here – to ensure that we get that rise in overseas numbers that the tourism product in this country deserves.”