ORLA SAUL – Manager Australia & New Zealand for Tourism Ireland
I’M FROM DUBLIN but have been living in Australia for 11 years. My husband Hugh Coughlan and I have two small children, aged one and three, and we live in Sydney, near Bondi.
We’re up at around 6.30am and it’s all hands on deck for breakfast. Hugh will drop the kids to nursery while I head to the office on Carrington Street, in the Central Business District, grabbing a coffee on the way.
When I get in I’ll check my e-mails. At the moment we’re in the middle of planning for next year, so I’m talking all the time to travel agents and tour operators, maybe organising joint promotions.
Australia is unusual in that more than 70 per cent of people booking a trip here will go through a travel agent.
The typical Australian visitors to Ireland are pre- and post-kids. They are younger people aged 25 to 35 or empty nesters.
The Irish ancestral link is important to many of them. Around 20 per cent of the population here has an Irish connection. Just yesterday, I was in Canberra at an exhibition of the Irish in Australia in the National Museum and it was terrific. More than 70,000 people have already paid to see it.
Australian tourists are great too in that they tend to hire a car in Ireland and tour even the most remote spots.
They’re very adventurous, they stay a long time – an average of nine nights – and because the dollar here is so strong, they’re really travelling this year.
Lunch is at the desk. I used to go jogging on the beach, but I’ve gotten very slack lately.
In the afternoon, I’ll be coordinating advertising campaigns and working with media companies to see what is the most appropriate medium in which to invest.
A lot of what we do now is through social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and even organising flashmobs.
I’ll usually finish up by five and go home and sort the kids for dinner.
Once they’re in bed, I’ll log back on because Ireland is only coming online then. The time difference means I’ll often be making phone calls late in the evening.
In conversation with SANDRA O'CONNELL