It might not be the annus horribilis augured by the Central Statistics Office’s (CSO) data in the early part of the year, but 2025 is probably going to be remembered as a down year for Irish tourism.
As the summer season reaches its zenith, a couple of interesting reports this week shed further light on the situation.
First up was AIB on Wednesday with its July purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for the services sector.
The headline index indicated that the wide-ranging services sector remained in expansion mode – albeit at a relatively subdued rate of growth compared with May – as businesses reported growth in activity levels, employment and an easing of cost pressures.
Tourism, transport and leisure businesses, however, are of decidedly less sunny a disposition. Survey respondents from within this subsector reported a fifth consecutive monthly decline in business levels and “at a faster pace” than in recent months, AIB said.
They also reported a marginal decrease in hiring and – in contrast to their peers in, say, technology, telecoms or financial services – higher input costs and output prices.
If the drop-off this year is primarily being driven by softer demand from international tourists, it appears the industry isn’t getting much relief from domestic holidaymakers either.
In a separate release on Wednesday, the Central Bank said that for the first time since it began collecting the data in 2022, Irish credit and debit card users spent more on foreign hotels and accommodation in June than on domestic properties.
In fact, more than half of the card spending by Irish consumers on lodgings was recorded outside the State in June, the Central Bank said.
Visitor spend was down 22 per cent in March, 31 per cent in February and 28 per cent in January, according to the CSO. The good news is that those precipitous declines seen in the early part of the year – both in the volume of international visitors and their expenditure – appear to have eased up in the early summer going.
Still, foreign visitors spent a total of €646.5 million here in June, down 5.5 per cent on the same month last year, while the overall number of trips to the Republic was down 2 per cent.
What the rest of the summer holds for the sector remains to be seen. But evidence that Ireland has been a more difficult sell to foreign visitors and domestic holiday-makers in 2025 continues to mount.
