French Hospitality

 

Providing a comprehensive overview France’s tourist policy here would of course be a complete impossibility. Although it may be the no1 destination worldwide in terms of visitor numbers, France must now fight to retain its market share for it is no longer on top when it comes to tourists’ daily spending figures.

Roissy Airport

L’Hexagone also has to adapt to the fact that the more traditional destinations are becoming more and more woven into webs of locations which are also fighting for themselves – perhaps above all else – as part of European networks, in a border-less Europe, in addition to their national groupings. This is the case for a group of Mediterranean and Atlantic port towns which have embraced the hospitality style of the Odyssea network; for towns of the cure and wellbeing which belong to the European Historic Thermal Towns Association; for stopover towns and villages along the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Mont-Saint-Michel or sites connected with the history of Saint Martin; and to mention just two more, the Cluniac towns and sites, and the towns that feature along the great trans-European cycling routes.

The proposals are growing larger and wider, their profile bolstered by awards – as well as funding – from the Council of Europe, initiatives such as the EDEN destinations and the various actions taken under the framework programme of the European Commission. National labels are also providing support.

The fires of Saint Martin sur la Loire

A detailed look at all this would naturally require several posts.

French professionals are fortunate enough to profit from a unique structure: Atout France monitors the competition, undertakes international promotion, plays the role of technical agency, gives training to all the players, manages a global image and interfaces directly with the public.

At the Rendezvous en France trade fair in Paris on Wednesday 28 March, France’s tourism development agency announced the upcoming release of a website and a mobile app (on the App Store and Google Play) which would give tourists a platform to share in real time their views on the hospitality of French professional operators.

Boniffacio

In the meantime, the rendez vous en france website is fully operational and deploys a dizzying array of interactivity via a generous helping of images and Googlified maps. It is aimed at 23 markets worldwide – from the most traditional, such as the US, to the emerging markets such as China, Russia and the Middle-East – and does so in 14 languages, again the more usual such as English and German, as well as Chinese and Russian. Unforgettable Paris, French Gastronomy, the castles of the Loire, the journey to Nantes and its elephant… your eye is caught so often that your head begins to spin. In fact you have to pass through a dozen screens one after another just to arrive at a specific topic, there is that much on offer. Thankfully, at the bottom of the homepage you come across France at a glance, and your head stops spinning.

The Grand Elephant, Les Machines de l’île, Nantes

The website’s ‘France Guide’ section provides fact sheets on events, themes and destinations. As an example, I suggest you take a look at the page on the routes of spirituality to see how this information could be developed and expanded upon by all the proposed cultural routes with this theme. It would, however, require some real conviction to keep this section going long-term. Perhaps it might be a task that the French Federation of Cultural Routes, which has already released an app for Paris, might consider.

Piazza Beaubourg, Paris

Coming back to France as a whole, the country has to makes sense of and deal with a survey recently conducted by Zoover, Europe’s no1 independent website for tourist reviews, which set out to answer the question “Which Europeans are the most welcoming?” Over 17,000 internet users from 23 countries responded. The verdict?

Let’s begin by congratulating the winners: “The Austrians, with close to 13% of the votes, top the poll. The Spanish and the Belgians, both with over 10%, came second and third respectively. The Greeks have managed to remain friendly toward tourists despite the crisis their country is going through; they achieved fourth place. The Italians and the Germans follow them.” Shed a tear for the Swiss: “The Swiss do not appear, in the eyes of European tourists, to be a welcoming people. With 3.7% of the votes, the Helvetic nation comes in stone dead last on the list. England doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet to its European visitors, either. The English come just above the Swiss, earning the sympathy of less than 5% of the voters.”

Vineyard in Gevrey Chambertin

France has every right to be proud of its 80 million yearly visitor numbers, yet still has a lot of work to do when it comes to how tourists are received. “The French obtained only 4.5% of votes, which doesn’t even make the top 10! This survey therefore confirms the results of a study commissioned by tourism minister Frédéric Lefebvre last November, which assessed that the quality tourists receive on ‘first contact’ in France was inadequate” (study produced between May and August 2011 in France, Spain, Germany, Austria and the UK by the Brussels-based agency TCI Research).

‘France prospers thanks to Lourdes and Pigalle’, Pierre Perret supposedly said. Jules Michelet wrote, “England is an empire, Germany is a nation, France is a person.” But a welcoming person?