Bowler to head tourist body

Ms Gillian Bowler, the businesswoman who made her fortune selling sun holidays to the Irish masses, is to head up the new national tourist body, Fáilte Ireland.

Charged with spearheading the development of the country's tourism industry, the new body is an amalgam of Bord Fáilte Ireland and the State-sponsored hospitality training body Cert.

The appointment of Ms Bowler - who founded and sold Budget Travel - to the new body comes on the back of a leaked Bord Fáilte report, which showed that visitor dissatisfaction over value for money in Ireland's tourism trade is on the increase.

More than half of the respondents to a Bord Fáilte visitor survey described their visit to Ireland last year as "fair, poor or very poor", while about 80 per cent of Germans, Dutch and Italians said they were disappointed.

Speaking at the announcement of her position in Dublin yesterday, Ms Bowler emphasised the need for Ireland to diversify its key tourist markets. "I think Ireland, as a small country, can't decide to be exclusively in one niche. We need to be all things to all people and I am quite confident that there are a number of things we can do, fairly quickly and fairly radically, which will improve the situation."

But in what was a clear address to businesses charging uncompetitive prices, she added: "It has to be said that all businesses run themselves, the State can only go so far in helping."

In the past 12 months, hoteliers have redirected their marketing pitches more towards the Continental European markets as fears over terrorism and the aftermath of the war in Iraq depressed the numbers of high-spending American tourists, which Ireland's hospitality industry has traditionally relied on.

One source, who specialises in recruiting for the hospitality industry, said businesses had lost confidence in the State's ability to address the shortfall in tourist numbers and predicted this new body would become largely irrelevant: "As far as I know, none of these board appointments were discussed with industry leaders. Businesses don't feel they are getting any value out of the new marketing body Tourism Ireland and I suspect it will be the same story with Fáilte Ireland. Really it's just a shuffling of chairs to facilitate political appointments."