• Ireland Travel

Travel in Ireland is booming in some cases where merchants are being creative in their use of conversion rates it seems. It’s all local travel as the fears of recession are doing what is expected, slowing down travel and commerce.

However, some merchants in a border town in Northern Ireland decided they could create some valuable buying power that just might get folks to travel up to visit them. That travel, while “local” in nature is still travel and if the word spreads to other tourists to the country they too could come up to Northern Island to take home some really great gifts for the Christmas season.

Some of the shoppers interviewed were actually taking this trip to Newry in Northern Ireland rather than their regular trip to New York City. It used to be better shopping to take that across the pond trip than shop locally with the weak U.S. dollar, but now with the recession looming, it’s a better value to go to Northern Ireland from the Dublin suburbs and take the euro conversion to get those larger savings.

Those trips are getting hotel stays for the really hardy shoppers who want to get the most out of their trip and save enough to justify the cost of gas to get back (the cost of gas is higher in Northern Island now).

Savings are coming to the visitors and increases in traffic to this 50,000-population town are amazing to the shop owners. They are seeing 2000,000 visitors per week now and their sales are increasing by 125%.

They built this 60-store shopping mall years ago and are now seeing the rewards as the conversion rates go in their favor now. It turns out to be a very smart thing for Northern Ireland to have gone to the euro from the punt a few years ago.

These visitors brave a 5-mile commute and the parking space hunt to get these savings. Hotels get extended stays and the local tourism economic impact is measurable and a welcome change for this Northern Ireland town, sometimes on the other side of the conversions, but now basking in the benefits of currency conversions.