Brittany Ferries is aiming to triple the number of Spanish tourists it carries to Ireland next year following the successful rescheduling of the company’s newest cruise ferry Salamanca on its Rosslare-Bilbao route.
The company more than doubled the number of passengers travelling by sea between Ireland and Spain last year. In total, 57,000 passengers made the voyage across the Irish Sea and Bay of Biscay, which was a 116 per cent increase compared with 2022.
It is just five years since the first seaborne link connecting Ireland with Spain was opened, but more Spanish visitors are now taking the ferry to Ireland than they are to the UK, even though services have been running from Spain to the UK for 45 years.
Nearly twice as many Spaniards travelled to Ireland last year, just under 6,000, compared with 3,400 holidaying in the UK.
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Brittany Ferries chief executive Christophe Mathieu said the company had “capitalised on the opportunities that Brexit has presented out of Ireland”.
“We have the capacity to still increase,” he said. “We are really putting a lot of attention on attracting a lot more Spanish people to Ireland because it is a very popular destination for Spanish. Next year, we have a mission to triple the number of Spanish on this route, and we are working very closely with Tourism Ireland on that, to have a strategy, a plan, and to spend more on marketing to get that done. But we can’t spend millions on advertising.
“We don’t have any new routes in mind, but we want to build up the routes more in terms of volume. We have capacity to consolidate. We already have six calls to Ireland per week. Before Brexit, it was just one call per week.”
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Despite the ambitious plans for Ireland, however, Mr Mathieu said the cost of travelling by ferry — like via aircraft — is going to increase as companies grapple with the transition to greener vessels.
The company already operates ships that run on liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is a cleaner form of energy that other fossil fuels, and intends to introduce hybrid and battery-powered ships down the line.
“All these things have a cost,” he said. “There are also some challenges to operations. For example, refuelling the LNG vessels takes longer so you need to allow more time in ports. One thing we have to be aware of, at the moment it is not obvious yet that people are willing to pay a lot more to travel greener. We think this will change.
“There is no way, all things being equal, that people will pay 20 per cent more per ticket to travel on a green ship. Maybe a few per cent more. So there is a transition there too. Otherwise, we risk being too expensive.”
Mr Mathieu said the company was also keenly aware of the challenges that inflation and the cost-of-living crisis are having on people’s ability to spend money on leisure activities. “We have to be mindful of that, but at the same time we have to be profitable and invest in greener ships,” he said.
“I think there are a lot of opportunities because of the geopolitical situation because I think less and less Europeans will want to fly all over the world as it gets dodgier and dodgier. People will still want to go abroad but will want to stay closer to home.
“It is very unstable in the Middle East, in eastern Europe, in China. I just have this feeling that will make some people favour travelling less far. Maybe for the next few years it is safer to stay closer to home.”
He added that bookings for 2024 were “looking good, especially in and out of Ireland, so we are very confident”.
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