Overseas visitors to Ireland in June spent almost €1,400 each during one-week stay

Residents of the US and Canada accounted for nearly half of the overall tourism spend, at €409.1m.

Tourists visiting Ireland in June stayed here for roughly a week on average and spent €1,357 each, new statistics show.

More than one third (36.8%) of the 619,900 foreign resident visitors to Ireland in June were from Great Britain, with a further 23.9% from the United States, and 7.2% from Germany, the Central Statistics Office said.

The CSO also said 1.2 million Irish residents left the country on overseas routes in June, heading abroad on holidays and for other reasons.

More than 100,000 residents from Northern Ireland, meanwhile, headed abroad via an airport or seaport based in the Republic, while a similar number visited Ireland while transferring to another destination.

This new release was a departure from pre-pandemic counting of tourism, given the CSO has changed its methodology for counting inbound trips.

CSO statistician Gregg Patrick said: “This new series is a significant improvement on pre-covid-19 CSO series on inbound tourism, providing more frequent, timely and extensive information than provided previously.” 

Writing in the Irish Examiner earlier this month, Irish Tourism Industry Confederation chief executive Eoghan O’Mara Walsh said a lack of data before now had meant no one could definitively say how well Irish tourism was doing.

“To the great frustration of the industry, there is still no national data on international visitor numbers coming into the country and tourism leaders worry that, as a result, Government policy is being made in a data vacuum,” he said.

Nevertheless, comparing the figures shows the number of visitors to Ireland remains down on 2019 levels. CSO figures suggest that, in June 2019, there were 1.06 million trips to Ireland. The figure for June 2023, for those who had finished their holiday, was 619,900 foreign residents who had visited these shores.

The total estimated spend by these foreign visitors was in the region of €841.2m.

That average of about €1,357 was comprised of air fares of €387, €42 on prepayments, €452 on accommodation, and €493 on day-to-day expenditure, the CSO said.

Residents of the US and Canada accounted for nearly half of the overall tourism spend, at €409.1m. This meant the average spend by a tourist from the US or Canada stood at about €2,420.

Foreign overseas residents who left Ireland in June had spent a total of 4.5 million nights in the country, with European residents spending the most amount of time here on average. This was followed by those from the US and Canada, and then Great Britain.

The visitor numbers come against the backdrop of warnings about a lack of accommodation for tourists in some of Ireland’s more popular destinations, given how reliant the State was on the hotel sector to accommodate Ukrainian refugees and those in direct provision.

The Cabinet heard in May that 28% of Fáilte Ireland-registered tourism bed stock was contracted to the State.

The hospitality industry has also been making a concerted effort to persuade the Government not to raise the Vat rate from 9% to 13.5% as planned in September.

The Irish Hotels Federation, meanwhile, had raised fears overseas tourism levels would not reach the levels required this year given the economic climate, particularly in Britain.

IHF president Denyse Campbell had warned: “Consumers in Ireland and across our overseas markets are already being squeezed by exceptionally high levels of inflation and other pressures on their finances, which means there is a very real risk that many will pull back from spending on discretionary items such as holidays and breaks away.”