Laois has been declared the third least popular holiday destination in a new report by Fáilte Ireland.
Our tourism numbers have also fallen by 3,000 people – down to 43,000 – in the past year. The figures relate to 2017 visitor numbers.
The report recorded Ireland’s most – and least – popular holiday destinations. A five-year tourism plan for Laois was announced for 2018-2023 earlier this year with one of the key aims to increase visitors to the county. A local company then later won the tender to drive the tourism strategy.
Fáilte Ireland state that the Midlands was also the least visited region overall with 218,000 overseas tourists, down from 226,000 the year before. The Midlands and the border counties were the only regions to record a decline in overseas visitor numbers last year.
However there is some good news, as it recorded 422,000 domestic tourists, an increase of 18,000 from 2016.
Top and bottom of the table
Unsurprisingly, Dublin claimed the biggest share of the nine million overseas tourists who came to Ireland last year – some 5.9 million people travelled to the capital and splashed out €2 billion.
Galway was the second-most popular destination with 1.67 million overseas visitors – up from 1.4 million in 2016. Cork closely followed with 1.6 million tourists, 228,000 more than the year before.
Counties Kerry (1.2 million tourists) and Clare (749,000 tourists) rounded off the top five.
At the bottom of the table were Longford (24,000 tourists, a decrease of 1,000), Leitrim (41,000 tourists, a decrease of 8,000), Laois (43,000 tourists, down 3,000), Offaly (52,000 tourists, no change) and north Tipperary (53,000, down 3,000).
Excluding Dublin, the south-west (2.4 million overseas tourists), west (1.9 million tourists) and mid-west (1.4 million) were the most popular regions.
These estimated figures published by Fáilte Ireland are based on its own survey of 10,000 overseas travelers and data provided by the Central Statistics Office and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.
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