Tourism Ireland has been voted the number two tourist board in Germany by a jury of 238 influential journalists – including editors of national and local newspapers, travel and special interest magazines, as well as freelance and online journalists. Above are Ciara Schmidt, Judith von Rauchhaupt, Lena Campbell and Oliver Treptow of Tourism Ireland with the award certificate.
For the 13th year in a row, the Tourism Ireland publicity team was named in the Top 10 among all tourist boards represented in Germany, in the annual TPR (Touristik PR) awards, in the ‘Verkehrsbüro des Jahres’ (Tourist Board of the Year) category. The criteria under which the tourist boards were evaluated for this award included: product knowledge, comprehensive replies to enquiries, organisational skills, and creativity. Tourism Ireland was ranked second overall.
Zoë Redmond, Tourism Ireland’s Manager Central Europe, said: “We are delighted to have been voted number two tourist board once again this year by the jury of German journalists. We are constantly looking at new and engaging ways of highlighting the island of Ireland to the media – so we are particularly honoured to receive this award. A key element of our annual promotional programme involves working with German travel and lifestyle media and bloggers, to ensure they write or broadcast extensively about the island of Ireland as a holiday destination.”
Tourism Ireland aims to build on the success of 2016, which was the best year ever for tourism from Germany, with visitor numbers increasing by 4% over 2015.
Zoë added: “Germany is the third-largest market for tourism to Ireland and is estimated to be worth close to €400 million annually to our economy. Last year was another record year for Irish tourism from Germany – when we welcomed over 650,000 German visitors, an increase of 4% on 2015. Tourism Ireland is rolling out an extensive programme of promotional activity again in 2017 – to keep the momentum going and build on that growth.”
About 16 million Germans have been seeing ads for Ireland this spring, on national and satellite channels such as ARD, Sat1, RTL, VOX, Kabel 1 and RTL Nitro. An online video ad campaign is running on Facebook, via the Teads network, this month. News and information about Ireland – including the Wild Atlantic Way, Northern Ireland and Ireland’s Ancient East – is also featuring on popular German websites, such as focus.de.
In 2017, Tourism Ireland will invite 180 top German travel and lifestyle journalists to visit Ireland – generating positive publicity worth more than €45 million. Email marketing is targeting 57,000 potential German holidaymakers each week and Tourism Ireland is also promoting Ireland to its 285,000 Facebook fans in Germany. Co-operative campaigns with carriers such as Aer Lingus and Irish Ferries are promoting ease of access to Ireland from Germany and Tourism Ireland is also working with online travel agents such as Weg.de and major tour operators such as Dertour, Berge & Meer and TUI Wolters Reisen. More co-op campaigns with other key partners will be rolled out during the year.
