Two weeks – A short time in tourism!!

Two weeks ago today a delegation of West Belfast tourism stakeholders led by our MP, tourism champion Paul Maskey, fond ourselves negotiating the long avenues and wide streets of downtown Manhattan as we made our way to Ireland House on Park Avenue.

 Ireland House is home to Irish government organisations based in USA and home to Tourism Irelands (TIL) US headquarters.

delegation at Ireland House, Manhatten NYC

The Tourism Ireland (TIL) team had agreed to meet us and receive presentations of our plans for 2013 as part of our mission to the States to penetrate that market place with the hope of increasing visitors to our events next year! (Post coming soon on Milwaukee Irish fest!).

With TIL staff there is definitely a warm, informal and relaxed yet ruthless energy and enthusiasm associated with their approach to the task at hand. TIL staff display these characteristics from senior management to their marketers to their admin staff, as they showed us around their offices and we began to set up for our presentations, the welcome was palpable.

We needed to prove to them that we meant business and we were in fact a part of Ireland that had a unique offering and visitors to Ireland needed and wanted to experience our offering!

We achieved what we set out to do with the TIL staff and they outlined a number of quick wins that we can work on immediately but as the meeting finished and drew to a close our conversation turned to the Notre Dame and Navy game and the work TIL were doing around this to capitalise on a captive US audience. They informed us that more Americans will be in town (An American phrase I picked up!) for this game (played in Dublin’s Aviva on Saturday) than there was in London for the Olympics!

So in terms of proving we mean business and that our brand is worthy – today, 2 weeks later, four guys aged from mid 20’s to early 60’s and dressed with fighting Irish T-shirts and jerseys were negotiating the roads and avenues around West Belfast. I chatted with them briefly and just as I thought - they were in town for the game, they then got tickets for the other big game in Dublin and with two days to go before they headed back home they drove North and wanted to spend some time specifically on the Falls Road – Now if that’s not endorsement of an emerging product then I don’t know what is!!