Glenans aims to attract overseas visitors

GLENANS Irish Sailing Club has just gone into marketing mode to increase interest in its summer courses at its centres in Baltimore, Co Cork, and on Collanmore Island in Clew Bay, Co Mayo.

Weekend and week-long courses are still available for beginners and advanced sailors with Collanmore Island, offering windsurfing, dinghy and catamaran courses and Baltimore housing the club’s larger keelboat and cruise yachting courses.

Around €50,000 is being invested in increased marketing — mainly through a new brochure and a new website — www.gisc.ie — which will allow for online booking.

Part of the thinking behind that, according to Glenan’s French director Hugues Traomilin, is to attract more overseas visitors — something which has proven successful in the past.

The club, named after the Les Glenans sailing club in Brittany in France (formed after WWII as a way of rehabilitating resistance fighters), has six permanent staff, 10 seasonal staff and 150 volunteers.

Many of its 1,000-plus club members are from outside Ireland, with a good number from places like France and Italy.

Traomilin says: “Continental Europeans — particularly the French who love Ireland anyway — view here as having the best sailing courses around, especially when it comes to cruise sailing and particularly when located around the south-west and along the rest of the west coast.

“The Ryanair generation may see a lot of Irish people go overseas and even sail overseas, but we are also getting a lot of interest from abroad.

“Our philosophy — as well as teaching sailing for life (more than 40,000 people have learned to sail via Glenans) — is to bring people of different cultures and backgrounds together through their love of sailing and the sea; we offer people a chance to broaden their horizons and challenge their expectations.”