Promoting Literary Tourism in Ireland: Examining Motivations for International Visits

Tourism is an activity of global importance and significance and since travel restrictions were gradually lifted, this multi-billion-dollar enterprise has continued to be one of the major performing industrial sectors in several economies throughout the world. Literary tourism occurs when specific authors and/or their literary works become so popular that people are motivated to visit those locations associated with the author or their published works (Busby and Klug, 2001; Hoppen, Brown, and Fyall, 2014). While literary tourism has a long history traceable to the seventeenth century (O’Connor and Kim, 2014), in the Republic of Ireland the connection between award-winning Irish literature and international tourists’ motivations to the West Coast remains an under-researched area.