Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

From my research on international tourism, it seems to be among the new buzz terms. Place bonding is what leads to repeat tourism. Our rate of repeat tourism is 31%, apparently. What are we doing to increase this? In Britain the rate of repeat tourism is 63%. What we have when people exit the country is a satisfaction questionnaire, which asks them whether they had a nice time, where they stayed, how they got on and so on. At the end of a holiday, unless they have had a really bad meal or stayed in a really bad hotel, people are in reasonably good form so will say everything was tickety-boo and that they had a tip-top holiday in Galway, Kerry, Sligo or wherever they were. I think the satisfaction rating is a flawed metric and that we need to take a different approach to ascertain and build place bonding because there is no question but that we can build our repeat tourism rate. We will never get everybody back because some people want to travel the world and they go everywhere once. Other people have place bonds and will say, for example, "I really loved visiting Senator Ó Céidigh in Connemara and I am going to go there every year because I love the people and they know when my birthday is and what I like to drink and eat and so on." There is certainly scope to build our rate up to 40% or 45%. What are we doing about that?