EY CEO Outlook: From tech to tourism with Alice Mansergh, CEO of Tourism Ireland

Alice Mansergh, a city girl with a love for the countryside, attended school in Dublin but spent her weekends on the family farm in Tipperary, where she enjoyed fruit picking and digging potatoes. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in English and Irish literature, she took a year to travel around Ireland and worked on a novel that she admits remains unfinished and gathering dust - “It's gathering dust somewhere, and maybe I'll go back to it with a distance of time”.

Her career took a different direction when she joined Google, spending 19 years rising from a startup role to leading Google Ads' UK operations, setting up an office in Hyderabad, India, and overseeing Google Chrome’s marketing across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Now, as CEO of Tourism Ireland, she's using her experience to position Ireland as a top global tourism destination.

In this episode of The EY Podcast: CEO Outlook Series, Alice Mansergh, the CEO of Tourism Ireland, joins host Richard Curran to discuss her journey from tech to the tourism world. Alice shares her vision for Tourism Ireland, the importance of sustainability, and how digital innovation plays a role in marketing Ireland to the world.

They also discuss:

-       Over-tourism - A headline of the summer across other destinations. 

-       Emerging world of the internet - “Reinventing the whole world of advertising, marketing and for consumers in e-commerce”.

-       Marketing - both an art and a science

-       Overseas tourism - It's all about increasing the value of overseas tourism to the island of Ireland and focusing on the regional/seasonal spread.

-       Finding those hooks - ‘The home of Halloween’ campaign.

-       Digital innovation - “When those followers interact with us, when they comment or like what we're posting, that, of course, amplifies everything”.

-       The hotel supply/accommodation crisis and new regulations.

-       Screen Tourism - “We leverage off that in our marketing”.

-       Sustainability - Making sense of every seat on every plane

-       AI in marketing and tourism – how it is standard now on digital platforms that you would be using AI based tools.