Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein)
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724. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport if his Department has a specific set of indicators that can usefully benchmark Ireland's tourism competitiveness in relation to other countries; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [22228/13]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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It is important that we draw on a broad range of measures to track our tourism performance and to inform both the operations of the tourism agencies and Government strategies and actions. Assessments of Ireland's tourism competitiveness are an important complement to the more traditional hard data on visitor arrivals and spending, giving us a general idea of the overall position of Irish tourism relative to competing markets and helping us to identify strengths to promote and weaknesses to address in growing Irish tourism sustainably. 

Accordingly, conscious of the differing demands of agencies, policy makers and industry and the balance required between quality, standardisation, frequency and relevance of statistics, my Department monitors a variety of available data sources.  These include official tourism statistics published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), surveys and analyses conducted by the tourism agencies and various international reports and indices such as the World Economic Forum Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report .

Furthermore, the Tourism Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is currently examining approaches to measuring competitiveness in tourism, including suggestions for useful indicators, and its findings and recommendations will be considered by my officials in due course.