As our capital city, it great to see Dublin rank highly relative to its peers. In January, Euromonitor released its International Top 100 City Destinations Ranking covering 100 of the world's leading and most dynamic cities in terms of international tourist arrivals. Dublin is listed No. 27 overall and No. 7 in Europe ahead of Madrid, Venice, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Budapest Lisbon and Florence. Unsurprisingly, London tops the European list followed by Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Prague. It's also worth noting that Edinburgh, a city similar in size to Dublin, just makes the list in 90th position.
So the decision to dissolve Dublin Tourism and integrate it within Fáilte Ireland is a noteworthy one, in that it changes the way Dublin will now be marketed. Readers may know that Fáilte Ireland does not have a remit to market Irish tourism overseas, so the task of marketing Dublin in the international arena ultimately falls to Tourism Ireland. However, I'm not so sure that this is the optimum model for the city.
By comparison, it's useful to consider what other cities (as distinct from countries) are now doing to promote themselves internationally. What's important here is the approach taken, not the size of the city.The best example that I've come across to date is New York. It attracted 50 million visitors last year, up from 35 million visitors in 2002. So how did this happen? Well, leadership, partnership, vision and ambition feature highly. Michael Idov wrote an excellent piece about this in the New York Magazine recently, so it's well worth a look. The model was subsequently copied by Boris Johnson in London and more recently, Amsterdam, Manchester and Edinburgh have adopted variations of it.
It's perhaps time to consider something similar for Dublin.
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