Tour guides know language of success

Margarita Gruber was able to leverage her international background when she spied a gap in Dublin’s hospitality market. Providing multilingual tourist excursions made her a finalist in the National Enterprise Awards, writes Trish Dromey

Spanish speaker Margarita Gruber spied a business opportunity in Dublin when she saw that Spanish tourists here couldn’t get day tours in their native language. Now she runs a specialist tour company for Spaniards and is aiming to develop a franchise.

A finalist in this year’s National Enterprise Awards, her company, En Espanol, provided tours to 17,000 tourists this year. It runs daily tours in the summer and on weekends in the winter, employs four full-time and three part-time staff, and has five buses on the road.