Waterford’s Winterval festival attracted over 1.8m unique visitors in 2024, double the numbers of previous years.
The festival celebrated its twelfth year and capitalized on its designation as the European City of Christmas, enhancing its festive offerings.
Visitor data, collected via smart city technology, showed a mix of local and international attendees, with a notable portion coming from nearby regions.
An increased number of night-time events, contributing to the festival’s appeal and boosting local business engagement. Winterval commenced on November 15th and ran over weekends for 5 weeks plus six consecutive for the last days of the pre-festive period.
The data is collected via a Smart City Data Collection which is operated by Three Data Analytics on behalf of Waterford City and County Council.
Winterval Directors John Grubb and Trevor Darmody shared, “We set out with some major ambitions to deliver a magical and fun-filled festival that would attract visitors to enjoy Christmas in Waterford plus we also added some night time economy events, like the Winterval Big Top Live gigs to bring in a new audience segment to the festival, and all of this has paid off greatly. We are delighted with the visitor numbers even with weather 2 storms during the festival. We would like to thank everyone who came along to enjoy Winterval and all of those businesses and sponsors who support Winterval, too. Waterford now holds the title of European City of Christmas for life, so we look forward to building upon that even further for 2025.”
For further details on the Winterval Festival see www.winterval.ie
