Europeans welcomed with open arms in New York

(New York) Europeans “dreamed” of it: after 20 months of closure of American borders due to the pandemic, New York is reopening its arms to visitors from the Old Continent even if the Big Apple will not regain its tourist effervescence until 2024. before the crisis.

On November 8, the United States finally lifted its “travel ban” on “non-essential” foreign visitors from around thirty countries, including those in the European Schengen area, the United Kingdom, and China. , India or Russia. As long as you are fully vaccinated.

And in recent days, the island of Manhattan – the world’s economic lung and international tourist magnet – has been much more lively, with the beginnings of a return from Europeans.

Like Eglantine Lasserre, a 40-year-old Bordeaux woman, who took the first plane from France on Monday: “New York has always been a dream. When I heard about the reopening of the borders, I jumped at the opportunity and arrived directly on November 8, ”she tells AFP all smiles, in the midst of the famous backdrop of giant screens. Times Square advertising.

Urban mosaic

Alexis Maynier too, a 33-year-old farmer in Aveyron, strolls for the very first time on Broadway, the 5^e Avenue and meandering Central Park, under the azure blue sky and beautiful fall light of the East Coast of the United States.

With his wife Camille, they felt “very constrained” by nearly two years of pandemic in France, “wanted to resume more normal activities and to take advantage” of the incredible urban mosaic that form New York and its five. boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island).

In fact, “tourism is the economic engine” of the largest city in the United States, says Chris Heywood, vice president of NYC & Company, the city’s tourism board.

In 2019, New York had welcomed “66.6 million visitors” American and foreign, representing an economic weight of “70 billion dollars” and “403,000 jobs”, details for AFP the person in charge, in a metropolis of more than eight million inhabitants and whose municipal budget covers 100 billion dollars.

With “8.5 million international visitors” expected in 2022, Chris Heywood recognizes that New York will need “a few years to be fully back” in the global tourism competition against Paris, London or Rome.

“We are counting on the end of 2024 to return to the levels of 2019,” he predicts.

New York has come a long way

In fact, the city has come a long way.

In 2020, New York was unrecognizable: Manhattan’s arteries deserted for weeks like in a sci-fi movie, hospital and funeral services overwhelmed by a COVID-19 epidemic that killed at least 34,000 people, residents in hiding and self-confined at home with the only outlet for essential shopping.

Rafael Delazari, a Brazilian sexagenarian living in Sardinia has also experienced the pandemic and the “confinements” in Italy harshly. He therefore reserved in New York and its mythical Empire State Building his first trip abroad for nearly two years, happy to be “in the capital of the world”.

Traumatized by the epidemic, since September New York has imposed vaccination obligations on its visitors for its museums, theaters, restaurants, etc.

Nothing out of the ordinary for Églantine Lasserre: “We feel completely safe and we would even tend to forget everything we have been through and suddenly it feels good”.