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I'm here at the Irish Hotels Federation in Dublin, where we've been looking at
the future
of hotels, hospitality and the travel industry. Tourism in Ireland is worth
7
billion euros. We're talking about 200 thousand jobs, around 4.5 percent
in terms of GDP,
that's if you include all those who work in hotels, guesthouses, and
associated industries.
So it's a really important part of the Irish economy which is why this
morning,
we had a government minister open the conference. We have another government
minister
this afternoon and we have the Prime Minister of Ireland
tonight. And Ireland has seen, despite the downturn, some
really encouraging things happen. For example, in 2013,
there was a huge national and international marketing initiative
called 'The Gathering'
which, promoted people who were
Irish, or have Irish connections around the world to come back and enjoy a
gathering
with festivals, with family members, with their ancestral heritage, with
whatever
pulled them most. And they saw, overseas visitors up 7 percent,
U.S. visitors were up 15 percent. There were,
as a contribution of tens of millions of euros
to the Irish economy through the gatherings. There were
over 5 thousand different gatherings and fesitvals
rules and things that took part of that whole gathering phenomenon. It was a
people movement
in 2013. Now it would be a struggle to follow that
but already plans are in place to do something similar
in five years time. Now, if we look back
to the situation in terms of hotel construction
before the Crash, from 2004 to 2008,
was around a 33 percent growth in the number of hotel rooms
that were made available across the Republic of Ireland. We're talking about
around
6 thousand, 8 thousand new rooms, but demand only rose 13 percent.
So there's been a glut of capacity, there's been a big overhang of
debt inside their hotel industry and so on. 70 percent of these beds are filled
each night by people who are from Ireland and 30 percent come from outside
the island. But things are changing. If you look
on the streets of Dublin today, if you were,
let's say, trying to organise a big corporate event then you may struggle
to find 200 rooms on a particular date.
Competing with all kinds of other events and festivals and
things like that. So occupancy is coming back, which is really very
encouraging.