(Paris) The French government wants to be reassuring about a possible impact of the riots on tourism in Paris, which is not experiencing a “wave of cancellations”, said Tuesday the Minister Delegate for Tourism, Olivia Grégoire.
“You have to keep your cool, we have no wave of cancellations in Paris. I have exchanged with all the platforms in recent days. We have a wriggle at -0.5, -2%, but that does not allow us to draw any conclusions, ”assured the minister, at the start of the summer tourist season and one year before the Olympic Games organized in the capital. French.
“I therefore believe that it is not necessary to add problems to problems” and “we are holding on to tourism”, she continued, during a trip to Essonne with the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, still saying he hopes that the year will be “exceptional” for the sector.
Very violent nocturnal riots, the images of which have gone around the world, broke out in several cities in France, in particular in Paris and its suburbs, on June 27, after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a point-blank shot by a police motorcyclist. For two nights, a lull seems to be taking shape.
According to the boss of the Paris Tourist Office, Jean-François Rial, the situation is however more critical.
“We already have thousands of cancellations. At the beginning of July, I think that we are already around 20-25% of cancellations in Paris on international customers and I would not be surprised if these are the same figures for the whole of France, ”he had said Sunday in an interview with AFP.
“We had a 25% growth in American customers in Paris since the start of the year, which compensated for the absence of Chinese and Russians, and we were particularly hitting the high end,” he said. precise.
Japanese, Chinese, American and South American customers are particularly considered to be particularly sensitive to security issues when they travel.
The influential employers’ union GNC, the National Group of Hotel Chains, has meanwhile identified “between 2 and 5% drop on (the) objectives for the first ten days of July and the objectives were very good”, indicated its president. , Jean-Virgile Crance.
The damage is “much more moral and sometimes material for the establishments affected than on the activity which should remain good in the summer of 2023, except for a turnaround in the situation of internal security”, he added during an exchange. with AFP.
France has been rocked by several violent crises since 2018, from the Yellow Vests revolt to protests against pension reform.