How Cork Airport's Barry Holland made the top flight

A couple of things helped inspire a passion for aviation in a young Barry Holland. His uncle, who worked for an airline, took Barry behind the scenes of Cork Airport, and mastering a flight simulator computer game also stoked his interest.

As the years progressed, Barry began to appreciate the importance of the aviation industry to Ireland: “We live on an island and the easiest way to get off it is by flying,” he says. “Aviation is an important part of our economy, and it supports many thousands of jobs.”

He studied for a bachelor of commerce degree at University College Cork, which covered marketing, economics, accountancy and corporate law. Then after a masters in accounting, he joined Ernst & Young in Cork and qualified as a chartered accountant. “The work was interesting, but I felt like I was looking for another calling,” he reveals.

To help him sidestep into marketing and communications, during the pandemic he completed a diploma in sales and marketing as a refresher, and in February 2022, he was offered a job at Cork Airport.

“It was a 180 degree turn in my career,” he says. “I did wonder if I was mad to leave a perfectly steady career in accountancy, but I reasoned I was still young, and I didn’t want to look back in 10 years and regret not making the change.”

With the last of the Covid restrictions still to lift, analysts were warning that aviation might not recover fully until 2024/25, but towards the end of 2022 Barry could feel himself settling into the role as the outlook for travel improved.

“My role covers PR (we don’t have an agency); B2C marketing; and stakeholder relations,” he explains.

His most exciting PR project was the Rugby World Cup last year, when journalists working for local press, radio and TV came to the airport to chat with rugby followers bound for France. “There was a real sense of revelry around the place. We took a TV crew to meet the captain of an Air France flight, and Aer Lingus asked us to hand out green berets to passengers on one of their flights. It was a good solid month of PR led by ourselves, and we got some very favourable coverage,” he recalls.

One of Barry’s key successes has been pivoting from a more traditional multi-channel marketing strategy to a digital-first approach, with spend concentrated online and on radio.

“It’s very seasonal,” he says. “From the end of December to mid-March, we promote summer routes, and from mid-September to early December, we promote winter routes. It’s the same every year but we have to apply a freshness to it, and ensure seats are filled when the planes fly out.”

Barry helped roll out a bespoke marketing campaign, highlighting Cork’s hub connections with Heathrow and Amsterdam (year-round) and Paris, Frankfurt and Zurich (summer), which enable airport users to fly all over the world, starting from Cork and with the bonus of checking bags through to their final destination.

“We have lots of good connections and we’ve needed to educate customers that they can fly to Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and Perth, from their doorstep,” he says.

The campaign – It all starts here – focused on the different destinations. “It was all to make people think,” he says. “The alternative [to Cork] is Dublin, a three-hour drive. We have the same owner, so it’s not about competition, purely about convenience.”

A third part of Barry’s role involves quarterly meetings with the airport’s stakeholders – which range from local businesses to the Irish Travel Agents Association ­– keeping them abreast of airport developments.

“Cork is a small place and the airport is at the heart of community,” he says. “We’re only 10 minutes’ from the city centre, and people take a strong interest in the airport so this stakeholder network is important.”

“Often I’m the de facto airport representative at networking events – luckily verbal communication is one of my skills,” he says with a smile.