‘Winterval’ Attracts 1.8M

Waterford has just celebrated its first year under the title of the European City of Christmas and the 12th year of the Winterval Festival, and new record-breaking data released from the digital counters across Waterford City show that on the Winterval Festival dates just over 1.8 million  unique visitors joined Waterford’s celebrations.

The data is collected via a Smart City Data Collection which is operated by Three Data Analytics on behalf of Waterford City and County Council. It enables the City to view the number of unique visitors to the area who have a mobile phone, thereby ensuring that each person counted is done so on a unique basis.

Upon winning the European City of Christmas title, the Winterval Directors John Grubb and Trevor Darmody, along with Waterford City and County Council, set about placing the bar high, with ambitions of attracting more visitors to Waterford for the festive season, and the numbers released have not only broken all records but also all goals set for 2024.

Speaking of the event's success, the Festival Directors, John and Trevor, say:

“We set out with some major ambitions to deliver a magical and fun-filled festival that would attract visitors to enjoy Christmas in Waterford, plus, we also added some night time economy events like the Winterval Big Top Live gigs to bring in a new audience segment to the festival, and all of this has paid off greatly.

“We are delighted with the visitor numbers, even with weather 2 storms during the festival. We would like to thank everyone who came along to enjoy Winterval and all of those businesses and sponsors who support Winterval, too. Waterford now holds the title of European City of Christmas for life, so we look forward to building upon that even further for 2025.”

Winterval commenced on November 15th and ran over weekends for five weeks plus six consecutive days for the last days of the pre-festive period; it has seen the number of people coming to enjoy the festival in 2024 double compared to 2023, along with an increase in ticket sales to the variety

Data shows that 3% of the visitors to Winterval were from overseas with the UK, Netherlands and the US featuring highly as the visitor's country of origin, followed by France and Spain, and 97% are from all across Ireland, with a large proportion of these visitors from the Southeast region and also from Dublin.

Hotelier Tina Darrer of Dooley’s Hotel says:

“Winterval and the European City of Christmas title has certainly shone a spotlight on our wonderful City for the festive season, and we have been delighted to welcome repeat visitors to Dooley’s Hotel and also welcome new first time visitors to the city.”