Paris, Aug. 30 (BNA) Despite concerns about the cost of living, heat waves and wildfires, the French tourism industry has rebounded dramatically this summer with an influx of domestic and foreign vacationers after a two-year stagnation due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Tourism Minister Olivia Gregoire told a news conference that preliminary data showed the summer of 2022 was “exceptional”, with 35 million French people going on vacation, or seven out of ten compared to about 60% last year, Reuters reported.
In 2019, France was the most visited country in the world, attracting nearly 90 million foreign tourists. “We want to remain the number one destination in the world,” said Gregoire.
She added that spending on credit cards during the summer was up 10% compared to 2019, the last year before the pandemic, in French hotels and restaurants.
Tourism generates 8 percent of France’s GDP and provides two million jobs.
Data for July and the first half of August showed revenue per available room (RevPAR), a key measure of performance in the hotel industry, up 22.2% compared to 2019.
Revenue per room in the Paris region and the French Riviera in the south rose sharply, driven by the return of wealthy foreign tourists, particularly from the United States due to the strength of the dollar, and from the Gulf states.
“We had plans to go as a family, here in Paris, as well as to other parts of Western Europe a couple of years ago, and we had to cancel that in the summer of 2020. So, (this is) a long delayed flight,” Graham Clem, a 38-year-old American tourist, said. from Seattle.
“We are in Montmartre (a tourist attraction in Paris) so it is clear that there are a lot of tourists and most of our customers are usually tourists, but it is true that last year we were serving mostly French customers,” said waiter Xavier Sarasin.
“Conversely, now and in the past few months, customers generally speak a foreign language, and we can see it (tourists returning) thanks to the languages spoken by the people in the cafe. The tourists are back in my opinion, that’s for sure,” he added.
Asked if France still targets 100 million foreign tourists annually, Gregoire said: “It may not be impossible to reach this number, (but) this is a goal we can achieve.”
MI