Tourism Ireland, with a group of 13 Irish tourism companies and four American tour operators, along with Aer Lingus and Delta, are conducting a sales blitz in the United States this week as part of the ‘Best of Ireland’ sales mission.
The mission will cover key cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Chicago, featuring B2B events and interactive presentations to promote Ireland and engage with US travel professionals, aiming to secure more regional and longer-stay business for Ireland.
The United States is a crucial market for tourism to Ireland, generating significant revenue and hosting a large number of visitors who spend more, stay longer, and explore various regions in Ireland. An earlier ‘Best of Ireland’ sales mission visited Austin, Dallas, Phoenix, and Denver in February.
Alison Metcalfe, Tourism Ireland’s Head of North America, said this week’s Best of Ireland sales mission to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis-Saint Paul and Chicago provides an excellent platform to connect our tourism partners from Ireland with key US travel professionals – to inform and influence those travel professionals about what Ireland has to offer and, importantly, to encourage them to include the destination in their future programmes and recommend it to their clients. As well as highlighting the increased air access from Minneapolis-Saint Paul to Dublin and direct flights from Cleveland and Chicago, we’ll be shining a spotlight on the many things to see and do, and all that is new and exciting, on a vacation in Ireland in 2024. The United States remains an extremely important market for tourism to the island of Ireland – it’s our most important market in terms of revenue and our second-largest market in terms of visitor numbers. Our visitors from the United States tend to stay longer, spend more and tour extensively around our regions.”
