OPINION:We know more about the travel patterns of our cows than of the millions of tourists who visit Ireland each year
STATISTICS ARE hugely important to the tourism business, as borne out by the results of the latest Irish Hotels Federation quarterly barometer. On the surface, results indicate an upturn nationally, but when you drill into the figures, tourism performance has been very disappointing in the regions. A marginal increase in business in certain urban areas disguises a worrying trend of under- performance across the rest of the country.
Nationally, over half of hoteliers are seeing some increase in business compared with this time last year. However, this is concentrated around the cities of Dublin, Cork and Galway and is due mainly to business and event tourism. The anticipated upturn has failed to materialise elsewhere, with occupancy levels lagging way behind in many seasonal hotels and resorts, particularly on the west coast.
The old business maxim that “what gets measured gets managed” really holds true for tourism. Statistics help in benchmarking against previous performance and, in turn, give direction as to where energy and emphasis for swift actions to save the season need to be placed.
I remember in my younger days being bamboozled by a series of charts that would accumulate in the little warren of a cubbyhole my dad used as his office in our family hotel: large square-ruled sheets with pencilled arrows and names scribbled against dates and room numbers. Later, in my student years, I learned these sheets and ledgers were how my father managed his business. He would use the combination of statistics and commentary to predict the season ahead.
Last week as the poor weather took its toll on my business, I was musing on this and thinking how we analyse our greatest Cinderella industry: tourism. For a business sector that is reported widely to be worth over €6 billion annually, employing some 150,000 people here, it is shocking how little we know about its performance. Although agriculture has been heralded as the greatest national endeavour, it has failed to generate the level of jobs that tourism has brought and that it is capable of delivering to Ireland’s recovery.
We know more about the travel patterns of the 6.8 million cows on the island than we do about the 5.86 million tourists or so that visit our shores each year. It seems Eurostat rules when it comes to the Government deciding what statistics get reported. Tourism rates low on the Eurostat ask list, so it has been ignored by Government data hounds.
Take the Central Statistics Office (CSO) for example: it used to provide monthly statistics on tourism nationally. Now the industry is provided with a rolling three-month cycle of data. It seems we cannot hire people to collect the raw data at our airports and ports. The upshot it seems is that a business that brings in over €6 billion a year to the State is not worthy of the same degree of analysis as the suckler herd, Rural Environment Protection Scheme (Reps), or any other agricultural or industrial endeavour in this country.
The availability of monthly, national statistics on tourism should be a given. However, regional tourism statistics are even less frequent or reliable, but strangely have never been the responsibility of the CSO. The computation of who visits Connemara or Donegal is only known through an arcane process that often results in wildly varying annual statistics provided by Fáilte Ireland.
One hope must be that Government would find new resources and imaginative ways to help collect the data that would help tourism businesses plan ahead and analyse how well our State promotes the country in key markets. If we had it by month, that would enable us to plan our orders, recruitment and marketing accordingly – just like we used to not so long ago. As it stands, it’s very difficult to gauge the success of marketing campaigns until almost a year after they’ve begun.
It’s therefore nigh-on impossible to manage the promotional activities for the tourism industry nationally because we’re really feeling around in the dark – there is no proper data available to analyse. So, for example, we have a campaign called “Jump into Ireland” that is running in the UK, and it may be two to three years before we find out how effective it was. We’re already planning a new campaign for that market with only provisional data that may be wide of the mark by the time the actual data are published.
The CSO, which comes under the Department of the Taoiseach, cites the Croke Park agreement and the public service embargo on recruitment as the reason for not delivering the required statistics. But that’s a false economy when we’re spending millions in promotional activity without knowing in a timely manner what the results are. In fact, we’re not talking about the redeployment of much more than five or six people within the public sector to make this happen.
In the past few years Fáilte Ireland has begun to treat tourism enterprises much as the IDA might treat potential high-achieving companies. It will amount to little, however, if there is no understanding of the vital facts and figures that shape the tourism economy. It is incomprehensible that tourism, much heralded by the Government as a key economic driver, is not getting the benefit of timely and accurate statistics.
It seems that during my father’s lifetime we had better access to statistics that benefited the sustainability of this industry. Whilst he might have lived by the maxim that you shouldn’t spoil a good story for the sake of the truth, I think that the statistical truth might give us a different story altogether if we had it.
Michael Vaughan is president of the Irish Hotels Federation and proprietor of Vaughan Lodge Hotel, Lahinch.