“Customers are afraid they won’t be able to get near the Eiffel Tower”: in Paris, tourist guides are looking gloomy, with the usual clientele fleeing the Olympic Games, in a context also disrupted by the elections and the gloomy weather.
“The summer is much quieter than last year. Last week I had two cancellations in quick succession, I think it was the fear of going out because of the elections,” Adriana Garin, a tour guide at Eating Europe, an agency that organizes gastronomic tours in the capital, told AFP.
“Our clientele is mainly American and likes to travel by taxi. The traffic difficulties are clearly a deterrent,” she believes.
“Tourists visiting Paris for the first time don’t want restrictions,” agrees Marie Dessaillen, a guide at Parisian museums. “Normally, I’m booked three months in advance for the summer, but now I have nothing. The Olympics crowd is not my usual clientele,” she says.
Between the price of hotels, plane tickets and transport difficulties, Marie Alicia DeGross, a travel agent, strongly advises her foreign clients not to come to France: “I can’t offer the usual itineraries because everything is disrupted; if clients arrive 30 or 40 minutes late for visits, it’s complicated.”
“Schedules are often busy, when you have two or three activities in the day, this requires fluidity in transport. This is a real difficulty that has been anticipated by travel agencies” who avoid Paris, opines Laurent Bonneval, guide at Context Travel, noting a “clear slowdown” in his activity.
Last minute
Although hotel bookings have finally taken off for the period of the Olympic Games in Paris, the event is dissuading some foreign tourists from visiting the capital, as Air France-KLM warned last week, citing “significant avoidance behaviour” of Paris.
Galeries Lafayette, for its part, anticipates a “loss of business of around 5 to 10% over the two summer months” due to traffic complications, warned the group’s general manager Nicolas Houzé in mid-June.
Added to this complicated context for the capital was the political uncertainty linked to the legislative elections, which put a stop to hotel reservations and caused its share of cancellations throughout the country, according to Véronique Siegel, president of the hotel branch of the leading employers’ organization in the sector, Umih.
A survey commissioned at the end of June by the Odalys group of hotel residences shows that the elections had an impact on the departure plans of almost half of the French people surveyed (48%). Among them, more than half (52%) responded that they were going to change or postpone their vacations or weekends.
“The beginning of July is rather calm, between the elections and the Olympic Games, there is a lack of visibility for the French. A shift is taking place towards the month of August, the wings of the season but also September which should be very strong”, estimates Vanguelis Panayotis, president of the consulting firm MKG consulting, interviewed on BFMTV.
The specialist also points out the weather, which favors Mediterranean destinations, and the problems of purchasing power, which accelerate departures out of season.
“From the announcement of the dissolution (…) the French were anesthetized”, they “blocked their reservations”, which “negatively impacted the first week of the high season”, according to Nicolas Dayot, president of the National Federation of Outdoor Hotels (FNHPA), interviewed on RMC.
“It’s not lost yet since we have a sensitive weather activity and if the good weather arrives during the summer, we will save the furniture,” estimates this manager of campsites in Brittany.
On Hotels.com and Abritel, accommodation searches have “accelerated considerably”, particularly for sunny destinations outside France, showing that “many French people are banking on the guaranteed sun card at the last minute”, according to Xavier Rousselou, spokesperson for these brands.