The Winterval festival celebrated a record attendance over the Christmas holiday, with just over 1.8 million unique visitors (after removing the local population percentage).
The data was collected via smart city data collection, which is operated by Three Data Analytics on behalf of Waterford City & County Council. It enables the city to view the number of unique visitors to the area who have a mobile phone, thereby ensuring that each person counted is done so on a unique basis.
Waterford has just celebrated its first year under the title of European City of Christmas, and the 12th year of the Winterval festival.
Upon winning the European City of Christmas title, Winterval directors John Grubb and Trevor Darmody, along with Waterford City & County Council, set about placing the bar high, with ambitions of attracting more visitors to Waterford for the festive season, and the visitor numbers released have not only broken all records, but also all goals set, for 2024.
“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,” said Grubb and Darmody.
Winterval commenced on 15 November and ran over weekends for five weeks, plus the last six consecutive days of the pre-festive period. It saw the number of people coming to enjoy the festival in 2024 double, compared to 2023, along with an increase in ticket sales to the variety of Winterval events.
The data shows that 3% of the visitors to Winterval were from overseas, with the UK, the Netherlands and the US featuring highly as visitors’ countries of origin, followed by France and Spain, and 97% were from all across Ireland, with a large proportion of these visitors from the south-east region, and also from Dublin.
Five per cent (5%) of attendees to Winterval were overnight visitors (accounting for 53,000 people), with the remainder being day-trippers.
“We would like to thank everyone who came along to enjoy Winterval, and all of those businesses and sponsors who support Winterval, too,” said Grubb and Darmody. “Waterford now holds the title of European City of Christmas for life, so we look forward to building upon that even further for 2025.”
