Tourism boost in Store for 2010 Sunday, January 31, 2010 At 9.45 am on a cold January Friday, a small crowd of tourists has already assembled at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. About 15 young Italians are excitedly taking pictures in the cobbled streets that surround the former grain storage and fermentation facility that has become one of Ireland’s most popular tourist attractions.
Ten years old this year, the €42 million Guinness Storehouse attracted more than one million visitors in both 2008 and 2009. This makes it the most successful ‘brand experience’ installation the country has to offer, by some considerable distance.
One in four visitors to Dublin turns up here at some point. The only comparable brand-centred attraction is the far smaller Jameson Distillery tour. What greets those who pay the €15 admission is a large building, spread over 200,000 square feet and eight levels, which takes about two hours to see in full. It has been refurbished carefully over three years, preserving the original brickwork and many of the original steel supports.
The tour includes audiovisual displays about Arthur Guinness, exhibits about the Guinness brewing process, opportunities to view iconic Guinness advertising- and, of course, a pint of Guinness in the Gravity Bar.
Managing director Paul Carty, who abandoned a stint managing five-star hotels overseas to take on this project, said he felt that it was special from the start.
‘‘They told me on the first day that this was not just going to be a brand centre. It was set to be somewhere to train bar staff how to pour the perfect pint, that this would be the corporate entertainment venue for Diageo and that it would get one million visitors a year - which, to be honest, sounded a bit unrealistic at the time.”
When Carty came on board, Guinness had a more modest visitors’ centre called the Hopstore, which was getting 380,000 visits each year.
‘‘That was our baseline,” said Carty. ‘‘Then we worked off a principle that all our creative ideas and the architecture should be grounded in truth - no pastiche, nothing glitzy. And that has worked for us.”
Luck played a role in the Storehouse’s success. One of the first-ever visitors to the Guinness Storehouse was the then US president Bill Clinton, who happened to pay a visit to Dublin within weeks of it opening. Americans are now the second-biggest supporters of the Storehouse, accounting for 19 per cent of visitors in 2009.
A focused emphasis on building up continental European business - rather than relying wholly on a declining British tourism market - has paid off for the Storehouse.
Italy is now its third-biggest market, and France and Spain are growing as well. Each new target market has been given the full force of the Guinness marketing effort, with a dedicated three-year promotional programme in the country’s own language.
According to Valentina Doorly, the Storehouse’s marketing director, some 300 overseas journalists visit it in a typical year. Doorly has stacks of press cuttings to prove how effective this strategy has been. Media impressions, which the Storehouse uses to gauge its visibility with potential overseas visitors, have grown from 45million to 330million in five years.
As a result, even in January, traditionally the quietest month of the year for business, the Storehouse can generally expect to get around 2,000 visitors a day. In the peak months of spring and summer, the average rises to 5,000, with each person spending an average of €20.
On St Patrick’s Day 2009, the biggest day ever for the building, a record 7,000 people passed through. It’s clear, said Carty, that Guinness is far more than a beer brand to international visitors: it actually represents Ireland to them.
‘‘The statistic always amazes me, but our surveys show that 35 per cent of visitors decided that they were going to visit the home of Guinness before they even left home. It shows the pulling power of it.”
The Storehouse also generates corporate revenue, centred around the Gravity Bar as avenue. While its corporate business has dropped by 10 per cent in the past year, this is still significant, with some 60,000 people attending evening events each year.
Unlike comparable brand centres - such as the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta or Volkswagen’s Autostadt in Wolfsburg- the Storehouse has been in profit from its second year. It has been able to reinvest €13 million in the business since its opening, without seeking any further investment from shareholders.
‘‘Our position is unusual, but I think it is right,” said Carty. ‘‘The problem for these other centres is that, unless they can start generating profits, it will be very hard for them to retain the quality of the product over time.”
But he also said there were challenges ahead. Tourism Ireland has set itself the task of boosting visitor numbers by 3 per cent this year, but Carty said he felt the Storehouse would be doing well if it managed a 1 per cent gain.
A huge issue for the Storehouse and all Irish tourism was access, he noted. He said he was ‘‘sad’’ to learn Ryanair was cutting some routes to Dublin.
‘‘That will hit us all badly,” he said. ‘‘It doesn’t matter how good we are, we’re an island nation, and if people can’t access us, we won’t pull them in.”
Tourism authorities needed to encourage the development of more attractions for Dublin, Carty said. ‘‘I believe Dublin desperately needs more attractions,” he said. ‘‘I was sorry to hear that theU2 Tower was not going ahead. We’re rich in museums, libraries and music - but we’re missing more light entertainment types of attractions.
London and Paris and all the major cities have far more than Dublin. Tourism Ireland knows that, and it is desperately trying, but it needs funding.”
This year, the Guinness Storehouse has a particularly tricky new target market in its sights - the Irish one, which currently accounts for around 6 per cent of its business.
‘‘This isn’t all that bad,” noted Carty. ‘‘The issue here is that Irish people would see this only as a tourist attraction, and we need to break down that barrier. The 60,000 or 70,000 people who do come here love it, and we get great feedback.”
Key to the effort to boost domestic business effort is a new loyalty scheme: the Storehouse is issuing7 ,000 ‘ambassador’ cards, which allow holders free admission to the building for the year, in the hope that holders will help them promote the facility by word of mouth.
The efforts are already paying off, in the shape of a 40 per cent increase in the number of Irish visitors in the last six months. The Storehouse wants this to result ultimately in a steady flow of 100,000 Irish visitors a year.
One of the challenges the Storehouse faces in tackling the domestic market is the lack of footfall in Dublin’s city centre. The area where the Storehouse is based, the inner-city locale of Thomas Street, is not on the radar of many Dubliners, though this does not seem to deter the 350,000 tourists who walk there each year.
Carty, who serves on the boards of several tourism bodies, is an advocate of doing more work to reclaim the greater inner-city area where the Storehouse is based. It is home to some impressive warehouse style buildings that are not generally in use. Carty would like some kind of upscale indoor market to be created, to increase pedestrian traffic in the area.
‘‘We have a great opportunity to create some kind of alternative here to Temple Bar,” he said. ‘‘What we have here is a wonderful area. It’s a kind of industrial chic.”
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