Visitors from North America up 10%

There was not a lot of evidence to suggest a big start to The Gathering 2013 in the first two months of the year, according to statistics released by the Central Statistics Office today .

According to the CSO's overseas travel bulletin covering the three months to the end of February 2013, the number of trips into Ireland increased by just 2.6 percent, or 30,200 bring the total number of inbound trips to 1,176,100.

However trips by residents of North America - a key target market for The Gathering and other tourism bodies - increased by almost 10 per cent to 141,600, over the similar quarter a year earlier. The figures reveal about 14,000 of the increase in visitor numbers in the period came from North America.

But there was further bad new from Britain where numbers have fallen by one million since 2007. According to the CSO, trips by residents of Great Britain decreased by 2.4 percent to 563,500 during the quarter.

Trips to Ireland by residents of European countries other than Britain increased by 5.7 percent to 393,400 while trips to Ireland from other areas outside of Europe and North America increased by 15.3 percent to 77,700.

While the figures do not include the impact of the St Patrick's Day festival in March, The Irish Hotels Federation said the numbers give rise to concern, particularly for the British market.

Federation chief executive Tim Fenn said more needed to be done to address the persistently difficult British market which was now the "single biggest challenge", with the fall since 2007 amounting to more than 30 percent.

Mr Fenn said the further drop in visitors from Britain at a time when other markets were starting to recover, was a continuing reminder "of the amount of ground lost" and he claimed the Government target of an additional 200,000 visitors per year from the UK, by 2016, was not ambitious enough.

Britain represents one of Ireland's largest tourist markets, but its market share has been falling steadily over the last few years. Britain was the origin of 47 percent of all inbound visitors in 2009, some 45 percent in 2010, 44 percent in 2011, and 43 percent last year.

While visitor numbers are up generally the hotels and guesthouses sector has also expressed concern that visitors do not appear to be filtering out from the major cities and tourist destinations, with a lot of regional tourism initiatives in financial trouble.