44% of Irish people plan holidays with AI

The Irish customer moved first

A survey of 1,000 Irish respondents commissioned by the online travel agent loveholidays, reported on 23 July 2026, found that 44% of Irish people have used AI search for holiday or travel planning. Among 18 to 24 year olds it is 71%. The same survey found 76% use AI search in their personal life, 41% at least weekly and 14% every day.

Take that number with the appropriate salt. loveholidays sells package holidays and launched an app inside ChatGPT off the back of this research, so it is an interested party reporting on its own market, with no named fieldwork agency. Attributed properly, it still holds up: the shape matches everything else measured in Ireland this year.

The broadest official Irish figure comes from the CSO, which found that 42% of Irish internet users had used generative AI in some form. That is internet users aged 16 and over, in the three months before the survey, published in December 2025. Use skews young and male: 72% of males aged 16 to 29 against 42% overall.

What Irish people want the machine to do is the part that should worry a travel business. The tasks respondents most wanted AI to take over were comparing prices at 34%, choosing accommodation at 32%, flight times at 28% and deciding where to go at 24%. Every one of those used to be a decision made on somebody's website.

Rankings held. Clicks fell.

Friday Agency in Dublin took sixteen months of Google Search Console data across its Irish client accounts, covering 175 million searches. Average position across those accounts improved slightly, from 6.38 to 6.18. Over the same window, click-through rate dropped 26%, from 3.62% to 2.67%.

Friday are careful about what that proves, and so are we. Google does not report which queries triggered an AI Overview, and their dataset begins after AI Overviews were already live in Ireland, so nobody can pin the fall on one cause. The finding is narrower and still serious. The same rankings bought fewer visits.

There is an Irish dataset pointing the other way. ePresence looked at 55 Irish websites and found average Google organic clicks up 0.77% year on year, with sites split roughly evenly between winners and losers. Put the two together and you get the honest version: Irish organic traffic has not collapsed, but the clicks you get per ranking are worth less than they were.

The damage is not spread evenly across query types. In the Friday data, commercial-investigation queries at positions four to ten still returned 4.24% click-through, several times what informational queries at the same positions managed. Somebody typing a booking-shaped query still clicks. Somebody researching, comparing and deciding increasingly does not, and holiday planning is almost entirely the second kind until the moment it becomes the first.

Irish agents own their answer. Irish hotels do not.

Survey numbers tell you the channel moved. They say nothing about what the channel says about you. So on 8 September 2026 we ran a Baseline visibility report on five questions an Irish person would actually type before booking: "Best travel agent in Ireland for a package holiday", "Where should I book a sun holiday from Dublin", "Best family hotel in Ireland", "Best hotels in Galway for a weekend break" and "Best tour operator for holidays from Ireland".

Method first, because the numbers mean nothing without it. Fifteen runs, five questions across three engines, fourteen completed and one failed. Perplexity is the Sonar model with its own retrieval. The ChatGPT side is a model summarising a live Google result set we fetched for it, so read it as a citation ordering rather than an independent search corpus. The Google side is an organic SERP fetch and it captured no AI Overview on any of the five, so every citation below came from the two AI answers. Provider spend was $0.018. Nobody briefed this and none of the brands are customers.

Across the run the three engines returned 59 distinct domains, around 30 of them Irish sites or Irish-focused publishers. That is a healthier split than we expected, and we should say so: Irish travel businesses are not absent from AI answers. But the citations sort by question type in a way that should change what an Irish hotel does on Monday morning.

Ask about travel agents or tour operators and the engines cite the agents themselves. Perplexity's package-holiday answer named Cassidy Travel, Abbey Travel, Budget Travel and TUI Holidays Ireland, and linked to cassidytravel.ie, abbeytravel.ie, budgettravel.ie and tuiholidays.ie among eighteen sources. The sun-holiday question pulled sunway.ie, clickandgo.com, aerlingus.com, killineytravel.ie and shandontravel.ie into a nineteen-source answer. These businesses publish comparison pages, deal pages and destination guides, which is exactly the shape of thing an engine can quote.

Now ask about hotels. The two hotel questions produced 32 citations across the four AI answers, and not one of the 32 is a hotel's own website. Fourteen hotels and resorts in Ireland were recommended by name, and every source backing those recommendations was a review platform, a listicle, a newspaper travel desk or a forum thread. On the Galway question, a city whose AI answers we have taken apart before, Perplexity opened with this, its emphasis and its citation markers:

For a weekend break in Galway, the best all-around choices are The Hardiman for a central city-centre stay, The Galmont Hotel & Spa for river views and spa facilities, and The g Hotel & Spa for a more upscale, design-led experience.[3][4]

Perplexity, 8 September 2026. Citations [3] and [4] are timeout.com and expedia.com.

Three Galway hotels recommended by name, and the evidence offered for all three is Time Out and Expedia. The full fifteen-source list runs Tripadvisor four times, then thehotelguru.com, timeout.com, expedia.com, kayak.com, theirishroadtrip.com, booking.com, thetourguy.com, trip.com, two Reddit threads and the Rick Steves travel forum. The hotels are in the answer. Their websites are nowhere near it. The same pattern showed up from the other direction when we followed every citation behind a Dublin hotel question.

We tracked six Irish-facing travel brands through the run to see how often each one surfaced, counting a brand as present if it was named in an answer or cited as a source. Out of fourteen successful engine runs:

Cassidy Travel appeared in every travel-agent and tour-operator question, on all three engines. loveholidays appeared in none of the fourteen. The company that told Ireland 44% of us plan holidays with AI was itself absent from every AI answer we ran that morning. Its Irish commercial director had already named it in the same press release: "The way people search for holidays is changing and as an online travel business, it's really important that we show up in the same places our customers are researching their trips." Five questions on one morning is a small sample, so treat this as a reproducible test rather than a league table. Run your own five and you get your own answer.

One Irish business in five uses AI at all

The CSO's enterprise survey found that 20.2% of all Irish enterprises used AI technologies in some capacity in 2025. Split by size, the picture is starker: 57.7% of large enterprises, 28.6% of medium and 17.2% of small ones. Ireland sits level with the EU average of 20% and well behind Denmark on 42% and Finland on 38%.

Be precise about what that measures: businesses using AI tools internally, for their own work. It says nothing directly about whether a business is visible inside an AI answer. It is a readiness proxy, and not a flattering one. A sector where four firms in five have not touched the technology is unlikely to be thinking about how the technology describes them.

Irish owners know it. A survey of 400 Irish SMEs commissioned by Google with Amarach Research found 80% believe AI can help their business and 57% believe they already lag their competitors, with fear of making mistakes the top barrier at 30%. Amarach's chairman called it "the gap between belief and behaviour".

The state has written the problem down. Failte Ireland's Corporate Strategy 2026-2029 commits the authority to deploying "a suite of supports that will help destinations and industry clients use AI and digital tools to improve on-line presence, AI-discoverability, enhance conversion performance and lift productivity", with targets of 90% of tourism businesses on advanced digital tools and 25% actively using AI. Your national tourism development authority has put AI-discoverability in a four-year plan and attached a number to it.

One number to keep separate. Tourism Ireland's RED C research covers potential overseas visitors to Ireland rather than Irish holidaymakers, and it found 16% now name AI as a primary way to research and plan a trip, up 7 percentage points year on year. Different audience, different question, so do not stack it on the 44%. If you sell to inbound visitors it is your number; if you sell sun holidays to Dubliners, the loveholidays figure is.

What you actually do

1. Find out what the engines say about you now. Write down the five or six questions a real customer would ask before booking with you, in their words, and run them. Not "hotels Galway", but "where should I stay in Galway for a weekend with the kids". Look for two things: whether you are named at all, and which domains the answer leans on. Those domains are your real competitors for the citation, and most of them are not businesses like yours.

2. Fix the sources that already carry you. If review platforms, listicles and forums are what the engines quote, then your Tripadvisor entry, your Google Business Profile and the roundups you appear in are load-bearing infrastructure. Stale opening hours or an out-of-date description on those pages is what the machine repeats to your customer.

3. Answer the question on your own site, plainly. Pages that get cited answer a question directly, in the phrasing somebody used to ask it. A page titled "Rooms" answers nothing. A page saying which of your rooms suit a family of four, what the parking is like and how far it is from Eyre Square answers questions an engine is already asking. We went through the mechanics in why AI recommends your competitor.

4. Re-run it, on a schedule. A single run is a snapshot and models change underneath you. Run the same questions monthly and watch which way the citations move. That is the only way to tell whether the work is landing.

See what AI says about your business

Questions Irish operators ask