More than half of all visitors to Ireland during last year's tourist season described their experience as "fair, poor or very poor", according to figures from Bord Fáilte.
Continental visitors were particularly disenchanted, with 81 per cent of Germans and Dutch and 80 per cent of Italians expressing disappointment, according to Mr John Travers, chair of Fáilte Ireland, the National Tourism Development Authority. Eating out, the price of drink, and of goods and services generally, were the main factors contributing to this reaction, he said in Galway yesterday.
Mr Travers, who was addressing the Irish Hotels Federation annual conference, said this latest data emerged from Bord Fáilte visitor attitude surveys carried out over nine months from January to September last year.
Some 56 per cent of all tourists said they had had a "fair, poor or very poor" holiday, this was "massively up" on the 36 per cent who expressed disappointment in 2000 and 39 per cent in 2001.
It was also more than double the average 10 per cent of visitors who didn't enjoy their experience here over the five years from 1997 to 2001.
The findings should "certainly prick any bubble of complacency" in relation to the challenges facing Irish tourism, Mr Travers said.
In relation to market share, business from Britain and the US had increased during the 1990s, but Ireland's share of visitors from Germany, France and Italy had fallen, he said.
This was worrying, given that recent trends indicated an increased preference by tourists for short and medium-haul destination journeys in the aftermath of recent terrorist attacks.
Mr Kurt Ritter, president and chief executive of Rezidor SAS Hospitality which was recently voted as the world's corporate hotelier for 2002, stressed the importance of marketing in Europe and urged Irish hoteliers to play to their strengths.
"When I think hospitality, I think Ireland," he told the IHF delegates. He called for more professional training, a better career path for young people in the industry and improved access. In the time that it had taken him to travel from Brussels to Galway, he could be well into the United States, he noted.
Mr Michael Rosney, a Kerry hotelier, said Ireland was fortunate to have one day in the year when everyone wished they were Irish and Irish hoteliers should realise that they were custodians of a unique tradition.
More than 100,000 people were employed in the industry "yet many do not understand now what céad míle fáilte means - and they are not all non-nationals", Mr Rosney said. "There has been so much emphasis on new technology that we haven't allowed the time to talk to our guests."
