€10m to Send Ireland on Short Breaks: Why the 'Find Yourself' Campaign Is Good News for Regional Venues
by CWDH, 5 min reading time
Fáilte Ireland is spending more than €10 million on a campaign called "Find Yourself", built to persuade Irish people to take more short breaks at home — with around €8 million of it landing through 2026. If you run a hotel, guesthouse, pub, café or restaurant outside the summer hotspots, this is state marketing money being spent on finding you customers. This article covers what the campaign actually is, what the domestic market is really worth, and — most usefully — the practical steps to put your venue in front of the traffic it generates.
The campaign, in plain facts
Where the money goes: campaign development and video content, digital and traditional advertising, radio, PR, and a €250,000 influencer programme with content creators whose combined audiences run into the millions. The first advertising phase alone carried a budget of roughly €2.3 million across digital, traditional media and PR.
Who it targets: Irish residents taking short domestic breaks — and, critically, it is aimed at the off-peak months and at what Fáilte Ireland calls "less mature destinations": the northern Wild Atlantic Way, the Hidden Heartlands and the Ancient East. The campaign is deliberately not pointed at the places already full in July. It is pointed at regional Ireland in the quiet months — which is exactly where most independent venues live.
What the domestic market is actually worth
Domestic tourism sometimes gets dismissed as the business you settle for. The numbers say otherwise: Irish residents took 15.4 million domestic trips in 2025 and spent €3.6 billion. This year it is accelerating — first-quarter trips up 6% on 2025, spending up 9%, and holiday spending specifically up 14%. All of that growth happened before the main campaign spend landed, meaning the marketing is accelerating a trend already in motion, not trying to invent one.
The domestic short-breaker is also a commercially attractive guest: they tend to book direct (no OTA commission), travel year-round, return when they like a place, and make late, weather-driven bookings that fill availability nobody else wants. A base of repeat domestic customers is the steadiest revenue in Irish hospitality.
How to get your venue in front of this traffic — the checklist
1. Get listed on DiscoverIreland.ie. This is the practical step most venues miss. DiscoverIreland.ie is Fáilte Ireland's consumer site — the place much of the campaign traffic is sent — and tourism businesses can create and manage their own listing through the Fáilte Ireland trade portal at services.failteireland.ie. You will need a high-quality landscape photo, a short summary and a longer description of what visitors can see, do, taste or enjoy, practical planning information, contact and booking details, and your Google Place ID if you have one. If your venue is not listed, the campaign is driving traffic to a shop window you are not in.
2. Sort your Google Business Profile. Campaign-inspired travellers search "things to do in…" and "restaurants near…" — and those searches land on Google, not your homepage. Current photos, opening hours, menu link and recent reviews on your profile convert that traffic; an out-of-date one sends it to the venue next door.
3. Build an actual off-peak offer. The campaign pushes off-peak travel, so meet it halfway: a midweek dinner-bed-and-breakfast rate, a Sunday-to-Thursday package, a winter "soup, sandwich and open fire" lunch deal. Named, priced, bookable offers get chosen; "we're open, sure call in" does not.
4. Partner locally. Short-breakers build itineraries: walk, attraction, lunch, pints, bed. Venues that cross-promote — the café that hands out the loop-walk map, the hotel that sells the distillery tour, the pub listed on the greenway website — insert themselves into that itinerary. The campaign markets the region; the venues that link arms capture it.
5. Make the venue photograph-ready. Every one of these travellers checks the photos before booking. Two nights gives you one breakfast, one dinner, one evening in the bar to impress — so the highlights have to be reliable: a breakfast worth photographing, spotless glassware, a bar worth a wet evening, and outdoor space that works in April, not just August. Our guide to photographing your venue covers the six shots that do the selling.
Why this is worth an afternoon of your time
Step back and the alignment is unusual: the 9% VAT rate is now permanent, improving margin on every meal these visitors buy; Fáilte Ireland's three-year strategy targets 7% annual growth in this same domestic revenue; Dublin's hotels are full four nights in ten and pushing overflow outward; and now €10 million of advertising is herding customers toward regional Ireland in the off-season. Policy, marketing money and market conditions are all pointing at the regional operator at once.
The checklist above — the DiscoverIreland listing, the Google profile, one named off-peak offer, two local partnerships, better photos — is an afternoon's work. The campaign runs regardless. The only variable is whether the traffic it creates finds your venue ready, or finds the one down the road instead.
Related on cwdh.ie
- Guide: how to photograph your venue
- Buffet equipment and breakfast porcelain — the short-break guest's first judgement
- Outdoor hospitality furniture and parasols for shoulder-season covers
- Glassware and bar equipment for the wet-evening bar trade
Campaign and domestic tourism figures as reported by The Irish Times and RTÉ, August 2026. Listing details: Fáilte Ireland — manage your listing.
