Corporate tourism rebounds with events worth €144m to take place in the coming years

Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland said they have secured an accumulative 335 international business events worth around €144m for Ireland in the coming years.

Corporate tourism has rebounded in Ireland post-pandemic despite global cost pressures weighing on businesses, according to industry representatives.

Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland said they have secured an accumulative 335 international business events worth around €144m for Ireland in the coming years.

“So far 2023 has been a strong year in terms of business events for Ireland with numbers showing we are almost back to 2019 pre-covid levels for face-to-face events,” said Fáilte Ireland’s head of commercial development Paul Mockler.

Mr Mockler said that the pipeline of future business events up to 2032 could reach a value of €1.2bn.

The National Tourism Development Authority, working with Tourism Ireland, will attend an event this week to try and attract more business travellers to Ireland for events and further boost the sector.

The annual IMEX America event in Las Vegas is the largest trade show in the US for the global business travel industry.

The business travel sector remains highly important for the hospitality industry, especially for an island like Ireland.

More than €716m annually was spent through business tourism events pre-pandemic, said Fáilte Ireland, but this section of the industry was beginning to lose steam.

Between 2014 and 2019, Fáilte Ireland lost more than €100m worth of business events and subsequently started an investment scheme last year for more gala dinner venues, especially in Munster.

The scheme will go towards developing new and enhancing old gala dinner venues in Cork, Galway, Kerry, the Shannon region, and Dublin.

“The sector has never been so competitive as destinations all over the world compete for this valuable business,” said Fáilte Ireland’s director of regional development Paul Keeley at the time.

“Enhancing our gala dinner venue offering through the Gala Dinner Venues Investment Scheme will be crucial in the continued recovery of this lucrative sector,” said Mr Keeley.

The tourism body has pumped €1.4m into the scheme and claims €90m worth of business events could be delivered for Ireland over a five year period through it.

However, a chronic problem in Ireland’s hospitality sector could become a problem for business events.

A lack of competition among hotels in Dublin is predicted to drive room rates higher for business travellers, a report has suggested.

The Hotel Monitor 2024 by American Express Global Business Travel Consulting showed high occupancy levels in Dublin, particularly in luxury hotels, are fuelling room rate growth.

This high level of demand amid a chronic supply shortage of available rooms has put added pressure on the market, especially with “a lack of alternative providers around the city”, the report said.

Meanwhile, the resurgence of business travel events post-pandemic has been heavily criticised by some.

Employee travel is one of the business world’s greatest contributors to carbon emissions, according to a post by the World Economic Forum in 2021.

“That’s due to a few factors. One, because of the prevalence of business travel by air and car,” it said.

Salesforce’s 2020 Stakeholder Impact Report highlights clearly how much pollution can be caused by business travel.

The report showed that in 2019, Salesforce employees generated a combined 146,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions from travelling for business.