Millions of Spanish residents are seeing eye-catching ads for Dublin and Belfast in metro stations in Madrid and Barcelona right now. Tourism Ireland’s latest promotion, in partnership with Atrapalo, a major online travel agent in Spain, is under way.
The campaign aims to boost late season travel from Spain to the island of Ireland and to kick-start business for 2018. As well as the metro ads, the campaign includes
- online ads on websites like El País, Huffington Post Espaňa, Ocholeguas and El Mundo;
- email marketing to the Atrapalo database of 1 million Spanish travellers;
- a dedicated microsite and Ireland booking engine on Atrapalo.com;
- Ireland article in Atrapalo’s Houdinis magazine, which has about 80,000 readers; and
- extensive social media activity, via the Atrapalo Facebook and Twitter channels (about 428,500 followers).
About 21% of all of our Spanish visitors arrive in the off-season or Q4 – a real opportunity to win business at a time when there is capacity in accommodation and other tourism facilities. Also, Spaniards tend to travel in the latter part of the year due to the high concentration of Spanish ‘puentes’ (bank holiday weekends).
Barbara Wood, Tourism Ireland’s manager in Spain, said, “We are undertaking a busy programme of promotions, to continue to grow Spanish visitor numbers to the island of Ireland. Our co-operative campaign with Atrapalo is an important element of that programme, to boost travel during the winter months and position us well for 2018.”
Spain is an important market for tourism to the island of Ireland; travel by Spaniards to Ireland has grown significantly over the past 15 years – going from just 90,000 Spanish visitors in 2000 to a record 391,000 visitors in 2016. Also, the latest CSO figures for 2017 confirm growth of over 15% for the January-September period, when compared with the same nine-month period in 2016.
