Tourism Ireland’s - Ireland: Three clicks away

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23/11/2005

Ireland: Three clicks away
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ourism Ireland has enlisted the Internet as its main weapon to fight increased competition from eastern and southern European destinations including Croatia and Romania.

The national tourist office’s general manager, Monica Nerney, said the organisation was increasingly using “effective and cheap” Internet marketing as a tool to maintain growth in Australian and New Zealand visitor arrivals in Ireland – in favour of more expensive media like television.

“We want consumers in Australia to be no more than three clicks from finding the information they need to book a package to Ireland,” Nerney said.

“We want to make it as easy as possible because the more people find out about the destination initially the bigger potential there is for them to stay longer.”

Nerney said Internet campaigns were successful because they could be targeted to a specific market.

“And at any time throughout the campaign we can see who’s looking at it, whether it’s working, and tweak it so it does get the results we were after,” she said.

Online marketing was part of Tourism Irelands strategy to enforce the perception that Ireland was a primary destination, Nerney said.

Tourism Ireland has appointed an online manager, Caroline Braunel, to drive the strategy.

The basis of this campaign would be the national tourist office’s new tagline for 2006: ‘Discover Your Own Ireland’.

Nerney said a series of print, online and email advertisements would encourage consumers to go to the national tourism organisation’s website to gather more information about the destination.

“We don’t want to promote a ‘new’ Ireland but we do want to communicate that this is a destination in which people feel that there’s still more to discover,” she said. “Most people hire cars to get around so there’s that real sense of discovery when you’re there.”

Nerney said the website was designed to give consumers enough information to plan their own packages which they would then take to a travel agent for arrangements to be made.

Nerney said the main objective of the Discover Your Own Ireland campaign was to extend the average length of stay for visitors which was currently 8.6 nights.

While this average was good for European standards, Nerney said Tourism Ireland was aiming for 10 nights.

“Because we don’t have direct air access, it’s really important to try and build length of stay and get Ireland up there in people’s minds as a primary destination,” she said.

One strategy aimed at boosting length of stay was working with wholesale companies to offer travellers two free nights in Belfast.

23 November 2005

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