John Walsh, Tourism Ireland Marketing Manager for the Netherlands, describes his working day
I'VE BEEN BASED in Amsterdam for the past two years. I live in Haarlem, about 15 minutes away by train. It's just as beautiful a city but less frantic.
Every morning I cycle to the train station, board and then walk 10 minutes to the office.
Our aim is to encourage Dutch people to come to Ireland. Actually, they are our fourth-biggest European market, with around 175,000 Dutch visitors each year.
Most of them are sightseers and culture seekers. We're also going after adventure holidaymakers. Citybreak visitor numbers are strong, but very many Dutch people go to Ireland for the angling, walking and golf, too.
Dutch and Irish people tend to share a similar outlook on life, and our sense of humour is very similar, so Ireland appeals to them.
I get to the office by 9am and start the day checking e-mails. We're an hour ahead here, so there might be some messages I missed the evening before. Much of my time is taken up in discussions with tour operators who sell package trips to Ireland. I talk to media contacts a lot too. Last year we generate €1 million worth of press coverage about Ireland.
We're also looking at different ways of communicating with our market. We recently commissioned a series, The Matchmaker, on Dutch TV that featured three women in their quest for love, with help from the Ennistymon matchmaker Willie Daly. It's a reality TV show with real people, but the true star is Ireland. We managed to showcase locations around the southwest and west as participants went through their dates.
The show goes out in prime time weekly, and we've had around 250,000 viewers each episode. It has its own website too, www.irishmatchmaker.nl, which has generated a lot of traffic, and I'm currently analysing all the data as it comes back in. Most of my work is office-based, but I'm also on the road quite a lot, going to trade fairs. We have a big angling one in Utrecht coming up.
We have a huge database of Dutch people who have contacted us looking for information on Ireland, so we work off that a lot. We put a lot of emphasis on our website, too, which has just been voted website of the year by a Dutch travel magazine.
I finish up at around 5pm and make the same commute in reverse. There are loads of cafes and restaurants in Haarlem, so most nights my wife and I go out. But if we eat in we do like the Dutch do: leave the lights on and the curtains open.