Aer Lingus in bid to woo US tourists with €80 fare
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Aer Lingus are offering cheap flights to Ireland in a bid to attract cash-strapped US tourists.
Holidaymakers from the US are to be lured to Ireland with airfares as low as €80.
Aer Lingus will offer off-peak rates from as little as €80 ($110) one-way in a bid to encourage more tourists to make the transatlantic journey.
In addition, Tourism Ireland is mounting its biggest ever campaign in the US to tempt visitors to Ireland.
The organisation has said that visitor numbers from North America are down almost 5pc during the first four months of the year compared with the same period last year.
Irish Hotels Federation chief executive John Power agreed there is an effort to promote Ireland in the US.
However, he estimates American visitor numbers at Irish hotels are down about 15pc already this year.
Numbers on Aer Lingus' transatlantic flights have plummeted by 14pc so far this year.
Sharper
The figures for May showed an even sharper drop of 21pc.
In the first five months of the year, the airline carried 417,000 passengers on long-haul flights both ways across the Atlantic, but that is down from 486,000 in the same period last year.
A spokesman for Aer Lingus said advance bookings were also down, prompting a decision to cut back on services from Shannon over the winter.
Transatlantic flights are only two-thirds full on average.
The Irish Tourist Industry Confederation said that their estimate was for US tourist numbers to be down 13pc to 14pc this year.
"We understand the position Aer Lingus is in in the short term, given the state of the international aviation industry and the need for them to survive, but we are concerned about the uncertainty about whether these services will resume in the longer term," said ITIC chief executive Eamonn McKeon.
He was particularly concerned about flights to San Francisco, as the loss of a direct link to the west coast would be like cutting off a whole country for tourism in Ireland.
Official CSO figures show North American visitor numbers to Ireland fell from 230,000 in the first four months of 2008 to 219,400 in the same period of 2009.
Their latest figures for Irish trips overseas show the number of such visits actually rose in the year to the end of 2008, although the length of these trips declined.
- Cormac Murphy
