Record 1.8m visitors attended Winterval in 2024, data shows

Ellen O'Donoghue

Just over 1.8 million people joined attended Winterval Festival in Waterford in 2024, according to digital counters across the city.

These figures were calculated after removing the local population percentage.

Having just celebrated its first year under the title of European City of Christmas and the 12th year of the Winterval celebration, the visitor numbers broke all records, and all goals set by festival directors for 2024.

The data was collected via a smart city data collection, operated by Three Data Analytics on behalf of Waterford City and County Council.

The city was able to view the number of unique visitors to the area who have a mobile phone, thus ensuring each person counted was done so on a unique basis.

Festival directors John Grubb and Trevor Darmody said that they set out with “some major ambitions” to deliver a magical and fun filled festival.

“We also added some nighttime 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,” they said.

Commencing on November 15th, Winterval ran over weekends for five weeks, plus six consecutive for the last days of the pre-festive period.

The number of people who came to the festival in 2024 was double that of 2023, along with an increase in ticket sales to a variety of Winterval Festival events.

Only three per cent of Winterval visitors were from overseas, with the United Kingdom, Netherlands and the United States featuring highly as the visitor’s country of origin.

The vast majority of visitors, 97 per cent, were from Ireland, with a large proportion of them from the southeast and from Dublin.