Basic Insight; It’s All About People but Technology Gets You Closer

After three years of difficult trading conditions Irish tourism needs to move towards recovery. Given that we are waiting next month for one of the toughest budgets in the history of the state, talk of recovery might seem a little premature. Nevertheless we know that economic conditions in some of our key source markets abroad continue to improve, and so consumer sentiment in these countries is likely to recover faster than here at home. In order to position itself for recovery, tourism will need to do two things. Firstly it will need to continue to offer value to a weakened, but still important, domestic market. And secondly, as we wait for some recovery in the domestic economy over the medium term, we will need more immediately to focus on opportunities abroad. This means redoubling our efforts to sell directly to those newly confident consumers in our more important source markets. This presentation focuses on how IT and in particular electronic distribution can achieve these two issues