Easter sunshine brings cash to Clare

Following a very successful Easter holiday tourism boom, Clare is set to cash in yet again over the May Bank Holiday. The exceptionally good weather of the past fortnight has lured thousands of extra visitors to the county, delivering a welcome multi-million euro injection not only into the main resorts but also coastal and lakeside villages.

Clare tourism promoters, hoteliers and other accommodation providers are confident it will be a case of more of the same in the coming days as Easter runs directly into another bank holiday weekend.
President of the Shannon branch of the Irish Hotel Federation, Michael Vaughan is happy about how the past couple of weeks have panned out.
“I would say it was the first Easter in five years that there was any type of volume of people knocking around and I would put it down to the lateness of the Easter feast. I think every business in North Clare got a good twist out of last weekend. anyone out there marketing and offering value for money, particularly if they were offering packages that included an add-on like dinner or entry to an attraction, they did very well. Packages are crucial and I think businesses that are actively considering what people want when they take a break in Clare, those are the businesses that are doing very well,” he said.
Families provided a lot of the business at the weekend and Mr Vaughan noted that there are a lot of people “rediscovering the home holiday”.
The Lahinch hotelier said the thousands of people attending An Comhdhail, the All-Ireland and International Irish Dancing Championships in the West County Hotel, Ennis, provided a huge boost to the county’s economy.
“I spoke to some business people around Ennis who made the observation that Ennis and the environs seems not to be as badly hit by the recession as other places. The surge in tourist numbers in North Clare and around the county would have been partly down to the dancing championships in Ennis. Because those attending the dancing were filling so many rooms, people who might normally spend Easter in Ennis moved farther out,” Mr Vaughan outlined.
“One thing this underlines for tourism interests in the county is that Ennis really needs a quality venue to hold conferences of around 500 participants and the whole of the county would benefit. Glór is the ideal venue because it is not attached to any hotel and if it was re-engineered, it could be multipurpose in the real meaning of the word,” he went on.
Mr Vaughan is confident about the coming weekend. “I think that there is every indication that the May Bank Holiday will be very good, maybe not as good as Easter but reasonably good. The one caveat I would put in is that value for money is the order of the day and any business that is offering that is doing reasonably well for themselves.
“I was talking to all kinds of attractions, Moherhill farm, the Cliffs of Moher, anyone with B&Bs in North Clare; they were satisfied with the first weekend of the season. I would be cautious in saying this but we might be turning a corner.”
Despite this, according to the Lahinch hotelier, having the Easter and May bank holidays one after the other proved more problematic than helpful.
“By and large, having the two bank holidays side by side poses a problem because people can’t budget for them that close together and as well as that, it is too early in the season for people to take a week off between them,” he remarked.
A lack of tourist statistics from the Central Statistics Office, combined with a lack of marketing for the region, are hindering the sector in Clare, he also noted.
“Our big problem in the county is that we don’t have decent tourist statistics available to us, particularly because the CSO have had an embargo on the recruitment of enumerators over the last two years and the statistics are now quarterly rather than monthly and the regional statistics aren’t completed at all by the CSO.
“Like any industry, we can’t plan without hard facts so we have a policy issue at the moment and another ongoing bugbear is that we haven’t found a solution to the regional tourism dilemma that we have here.
“Because we are not part of the Fáilte Ireland tourism family, we are outside of that and in fact, at a recent travel trade fair in Dublin, Fáilte Ireland handed out a memory stick to overseas market representatives that contained information and brochures on all other regions except Clare, Limerick and North Tipperary.
“Shannon Development used to take up the slack because they had a big marketing budget for the region but they no longer have that. There are somewhere in the region of 20 people working in Shannon Development promoting tourism and they have no marketing budget. Their hands are tied and we are paddling against the tide. We could do a lot more if the resources were available to us,” he said.
According to Kilkee Town Councillor and local business person, Elaine Haugh Hayes the resort experienced its busiest Easter weekend for several years. Further west, Carrigaholt and Kilbaha were also exceptionally busy. Carrigaholt is hosting its annual Oyster Festival this weekend.
“I have to say without a doubt I haven’t experienced an Easter like this in a long, long time. You couldn’t get better weather than what we got. There was a very good buzz around. People were just happy to be down and just relaxing and chilling. There was no talk of recession or the state of the country.
“There’s a lot more people around. They don’t seem to be holidaying abroad as much and the holiday homes are being used a lot more. Also Easter has fallen so late and with the May weekend going straight into it, it was perfect and the weather was perfect. We just got everything good together,” she added.
Councillor Haugh Hayes highlighted how families are spending much of the mid-term break in Kilkee this year.
“There are loads of families staying for two weeks. People are using their houses or are giving them to their friends or other family members,” she said.