GoIreland.com to Consolidate Positioning as Ireland's Largest Tourist Accommodation Website

Gulliver Ireland, the owner of one of Ireland's longest established travel websites, GoIreland.com, announced today (Monday, 14th April 2008) that it has relaunched the website to consolidate its positioning as the largest tourist accommodation website on the island of Ireland. Gulliver Ireland, Ireland's leading cost effective provider of reservations and tourism information, is part of FEXCO.

The GoIreland.com website will handle a projected 55,000 domestic and overseas bookings this year, which equates to almost 200,000 bednights. Traffic to the new website during the first four weeks increased by 15 per cent compared with last year, which is attributed to better visibility on search engines such as Google. GoIreland.com was ranked in the Top 15 Travel and Airlines Market in the newly published 'The Net Behaviour Report' on Irish Internet usage.

The website has a new 'look and feel', featuring more travel information on 'things to see and do' and offering a wider spread of tourist accommodation, approximately 8,000 properties, which is more than any other Irish tourism-related website.

The overhaul of the website's content, which has a significant regional focus including regional landing pages for all counties, will continue throughout the year. The new website allows tourism business owners to sell their properties better than ever by including detailed premises and local information, photographs and the option of enhanced listings. It delivers booking availability in every county on the island and across all accommodation categories.

"People booking accommodation are booking an experience. To sell effectively online, you have to show your customers the kind of experiences they can have. We urge tourism businesses around Ireland to take advantage of the new GoIreland.com website and show up to 120,000 visitors every week at the height of the tourist season what you have and what is around you," said Dr Stewart Stephens, Managing Director of Gulliver Ireland.

Significantly, the company has made a strategic decision to retain the website's call centre support so that customers may book by telephone or access a wide range of customer services by telephone.

Originally established in 1996, Gulliver Ireland acquired GoIreland.com in 2001. It has recorded exceptional year-on-year bookings growth over the past four years. As Gulliver's flagship website, it has performed strongly across different accommodation sectors. The website delivers more B&B bookings by far than any other Irish website. Hotel bookings through GoIreland.com have soared by a factor of 5 compared with 2003 and are projected to reach €7 million in value in 2008.

Gulliver's in-house Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), content and technical teams planned and executed the entire project, which saw the 70,000-page website rebuilt from the ground up. The project took more than 12 months to complete. As a result, the relaunched website benefits from a cleaner, more up-to-date user interface as well as an improved technical architecture. This will allow GoIreland.com to evolve and keep pace with new developments in the online environment. The website's booking process was also optimised to reduce the time required to make a booking.

Speaking at the website relaunch, Dr Stephens said, "Now 12 years in operation, GoIreland.com has deservedly earned a reputation as Ireland's leading tourism portal. Over that period, we have consistently applied changes and improvements to the website so that we could best serve tourist bookers and accommodation providers.

"However, given technical advances, changing customer demands and our desire to keep GoIreland.com ahead of the game, we committed to investing in this significant revamp project. The early indications are that customers have taken to the website developments, which will allow us to drive our domestic tourist and overseas booking growth into the future," added Dr Stephens.