Can the alure of Star Wars, Game of Thrones and direct flights get Chinese tourists flocking to Ireland?
Michael D’Arcy, minister of state at Ireland’s Department of Finance, hopes a new direct route between Hong Kong and Dublin will boost tourism and trade
A new direct flight between Hong Kong and Dublin could help attract more mainland tourists to visit Ireland, known to many as the setting for the Star Wars films and the TV smash hit Game of Thrones, according to Michael D’Arcy, minister of state at Ireland’s finance department.
The new Cathay Pacific flight to the Republic of Ireland’s capital will operate four times a week from June 2, and D’Arcy hopes it will bring China and Ireland closer together in terms of both trade and tourism.
“There are only about 40,000 visitors from mainland China each year, which is very small compared with other cities, which receive hundreds of thousands of mainland tourists. The lack of a direct flight may be the reason, and we hope the new flights from Hong Kong will change that,” D’Arcy said in an interview with the South China Morning Post when he visited the city last week.
It currently takes mainland travellers take twice as long to get to Dublin as it takes them to travel to New Zealand, D’Arcy said.
Mainland tourists, expected by CLSA to make 200 million foreign trips annually by 2020, visit Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea and Japan in their greatest numbers. Dublin is not yet on their list of favourite destinations.
D’Arcy hopes the direct flight will appeal to some of the roughly 100 million people living in southern China, many of whom will have glimpsed Ireland’s dramatic scenery in the Star Wars movies and HBO television series Game of Thrones.