Happy Travel Thursday, friends! 

For today’s post, I’m continuing the recap of my trip to Scotland & Ireland, but before I start breaking down my trip by the different places that I visited, I thought it might be nice to take some time to chat about what it’s like to travel to Ireland in the off-season. 

Picture this: It’s July in Boston. 85, 90 degrees Fahrenheit and full humidity, and I’m living on the second floor of a triple decker with no air conditioning. And after two and a half years of mask-wearing and test-taking, the two dreaded lines have appeared—COVID. Three days into quarantine, my fever has broken, but it’s been replaced with cabin fever. And so, when my friend Kayla called me and said that she found tickets to Ireland for three hundred and fifty dollars…I didn’t ask when, or what airline, or what airport…I just said yes. Less than an hour later, I booked a ticket to Ireland for the last week of March 2023. 

After my somewhat-impulsive vacation decision, I started to wonder why the tickets were so cheap. Was it a flash deal, or was this going to be a dark, miserable and rainy trip? 

(Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. But we’ll get to that below!)  

According to this article from Kayak , February is the cheapest month to purchase plane tickets to Ireland—but the average cost of a flight in March was just five dollars more than February, making it the second-cheapest time to purchase flights. And while St. Patrick’s Day brings plenty of visitors to the Emerald Isle, the rest of the month is considered the “off season” for tourists. 

So what is it like to visit Ireland in March? 

Weather

During our trip in 2023, we experienced a little bit of everything when it came to weather—rain, wind, fog, and sun. (Honestly, it felt a lot like New England!) For the most part, the rain was fairly gentle (excluding one heavy storm in Connemara National Park). And we never experienced any of the weather listed above for particularly long: after a few minutes, or a few hours at the latest, the fog, or rain would clear away. 

The default weather for the week was overcast and 40-55 degrees. At no point did it feel particularly cold— I wore a fleece-lined waterproof jacket almost every day and was fine. The one bummer, for me, as a photographer, was the lack of sun, but that was in many ways to be expected. 

Accommodations

We were able to book accommodations (a mixture of Airbnbs, hotels and hostels) ahead of time fairly easily. In Galway, we booked the cutest stone cottage, located in the heart of downtown; in Kinsale, we stayed at a lovely inn with a lovely breakfast. A last minute stop in Limerick saw us in a hotel, but there were rooms easily available. The only place that we struggled to find affordable accommodation was Dublin, but we stayed at a hostel on O’Connell Street that put us in the middle of the action. 

Crowds 

I am a big fan of traveling in the off-season, largely because I am something of a grumpy old woman who hates big crowds and (at the risk of sounding like a snob) throngs of tourists. Traveling through Ireland in March, therefore, was perfect for me. When we arrived, there were some tourists in Galway and a handful in Dublin, a tour group that hiked the same mountain in Connemara with us, but otherwise it was massively quiet. 

Overall, I really enjoyed traveling through Ireland during the off-season in the month of March—between the nice(ish) weather, easy to book accommodations and lack of crowds, I thought it was the perfect time to visit. And hey, with tickets so cheap — you might see me there again in March 2024 (or 2025, or 2026…)