An extra 19,000 US and Canadian tourists flocked to Ireland in the first two months of the year, new data revealed on Monday.
That’s an 11% boost on the numbers spending their dollars here compared with January and February 2018.
And our Cead Mile Failte resulted in a total of 590,700 trips to this country last month alone - up 2.7% since last year.
But we’ve seen a slight dip in visitors from Britain as uncertainty surrounding Brexit continues - 258,100 trips last month, down 2% on the 263,500 for February 2018.
Overall, there were 1.2million trips here by overseas residents to this country in the first two months of the year.
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The Central Statistics Office figures were welcomed by Tourism Ireland’s Niall Gibbons, who said: “The figures from the CSO indicate that overseas arrivals increased by +7% in the first two months of 2019, around 81,200 additional arrivals when compared with January-February 2018.
“However, it is early days yet – arrivals in January and February represent around 11% of total annual arrivals and growth in the month of February alone has slowed to +2.7%.
“Arrivals from North America grew by almost +11% in the first two months of 2019, an extra 18,700 US and Canadian visitors. We’ve also seen good results from Mainland Europe, up almost +8%, with particularly strong performances from France, Spain and Germany.”
And it’s not all one-way traffic - the data also shows the number of overseas trips by Irish residents last month increased by 13% to 556,300.
