Mr. Paul Kelly:

I will give a perspective on that. Our primary concerns as we look into next year are on the supply side rather than the demand side, because of the amount of stock that is coming out of the system. There are other challenges also such as the amount of car rental stock in the country, which will be significantly lower than in 2019. Our primary concern in the tourism sector is the supply side. Certainly, now is not the time for additional broad-scale incentives. When we look at how we will deploy our domestic marketing, it will be very agile, working it where there are opportunities to drive incremental revenue and incremental employment into areas based on where there is still availability and good value for domestic visitors. As to the merits of such a scheme at some future point, this would depend on the economic and the global economic scenario.

It is also worth the committee being aware of another aspect. Mr. Fenn spoke about the challenges in the UK market and the moderate place the European market is at the moment. It is important that we also look at the US market. Given the combination of the rate of inflation in the US and the rate of inflation in the tourism and hospitality businesses in the US, combined with the dollar to euro exchange rate, it means that Ireland - even at the prices we are at - is presenting very good value to the US visitor. There is a significant desire among US visitors to travel to Ireland. This area would be particularly strong for us next year given how things are looking at the moment. I would not be layering in additional demand-driving initiatives at this point in time.

With domestic visitors, we are still seeing very strong intent on domestic visitors taking a break in Ireland next year. We are not overly concerned about that at this point. Domestic visitors are very agile and very quick to decide. If the value is there they will go. They make the decisions in a relatively short timeframe. If the value is there they will go. We would, however, be concerned around excessive pricing. It might depress that later on in the year but as Mr. Fenn said, the booking cycles are so short now it is hard to read into what is currently on the books, or read anything from it. The intent certainly is high for domestic visitors to take a break domestically next year.