Ireland of the welcomes

I spent the past week travelling the country speaking to tourists and people involved in the hospitality trade in an effort to find out what was going on in this pretty important sector. What I found surprised me on a couple of fronts.

For a start, things appear to be pretty good. After a slow start to the season, the numbers arriving on our shores this year are now almost on par for last year, and have been improving as the season progressed. So much so that hotel rooms in Galway this week were at an absolute premium, especially if you are like me and just turn up at some hotel late in the evening, not having booked. In Killarney things were pretty busy as well, but there was no shortage of hotels, several new ones having been built in recent years.

The thing that surprised me most of all was the positive attitude visitors had to our country. We have become so used to running ourselves down that we expect everyone else to do the same. I have to admit I was taken a little aback by what people said to me.

Almost to a man and woman, the only complaint tourists made to me during the week was about the cost of eating out. People from the US – only when pushed – admitted that it was much more expensive to eat in restaurants here than at home. But all of them said it was worth it to experience our country. They hugely enjoyed things like Blarney Castle, Killarney and every other tourist trap you could name. They liked the pubs, the atmosphere on the streets and most of all the people they met. One tour operator who brings 20,000 US tourists here every year said that the thing his customers wanted more than anything was to interact with Irish people; if they got enough of that, they went home very happy.

It is quite flattering to say the least that people have such a high opinion of us when we often have such a low one of ourselves. One man from Boston, who I met on Eyre Square in Galway, even when faced with the monumental scandal that is the development work there, refused to run us down. Things were just the same at home, he said. This even as the hoardings, rubble and junk were obscuring the view of the fast food joints.

Italians, quite simply, are in love with us, and even they can't explain why. Maybe, one woman told me, it is because we are so similar. But then she had to be lying because she tried to convince me that eating out in Italy was just as expensive as in Ireland.

I think the best people I met were two young Polish students who found a way around paying our high costs. They arrived to London by bus and hitched to Cork from there. They then found a job for a few weeks and were spending ten days hitching around the country, tent in tow. They were buying their own food and after going all over the West of Ireland would then hitch back to London and be back in university next month. Transport costs, restaurants – you name it – were all neatly bypassed.

If the sector is suffering, it must be because Irish people now find it much cheaper to holiday abroad than at home. Ian Parr who owns the Custom House restaurant in Baltimore, County Cork, said that when he started in business here in 1992 most of his customers were ordinary middle class Irish people. At the time they couldn't afford to go abroad. Now his customer base was mostly professionals from Dublin and Cork, the people who can really afford to holiday well at home. No market in the world has changed as much as ours in the last ten years, he says.

Another operator said that there is really only one thing foreign tourists complain about, and that's dirt and litter. They don't expect it, they don't want it and the certainly don't like it. That could so easily be remedied.

For myself after a week out and about, I have a question for our hotels. Is it really a good idea to have people from Eastern Europe, with communist era Eastern European interpersonal skills at reception desks? One or two I met last week would not be out of place in some of the grim hotels in the former Soviet states I have had the dubious pleasure of gracing. If Americans want most to interact with Irish people, they will be sorely disappointed if they try it in most hotels.