The 60th week of a long holiday is about to start. France, the single most visited tourist venue on the planet, is having a vacation – from tourism. In 2019, France sat at the top of the global tourist visits league – as it has for decades. The flipside of this long dominance is that the country now has a large hole to fill. Official estimates in the first year of coronavirus were that maybe 85% of France’s annual 90 million tourist visits went missing.
The French tourist industry is even bigger than French agriculture and employs over two million people. Since most of them vote, there is real political urgency to restart the tourist lifeblood this summer. Fortunately, domestic tourism is a major shock absorber to fill the hole – as proven after the terror attacks in 2015 and 2016. In 2021, some 95% of French holidaymakers say they intend to stay in France.
The Paris region – normally – sees about 50 million annual tourist visits. The historic museums and palaces all attract big numbers, but far less than the 15 million annual visitors to Disneyland, France’s biggest single attraction. Normally, fair-skinned Dutch families wearing black mouse ears rub shoulders with commuters on my RER A train (the direct line to Disney). Now the trains are half empty, even at rush hour.
Coronavirus impacts across France have proved uneven. The bigger losers are cities such as Paris, Nice (cancelled trade fairs) and Toulouse (transport industry hub) with the worst affected micro-economies including Roissy (around CDG airport), the island of Corsica and the Pas de Calais (both Brexit and Covid). The more resilient cities include Lille and Rennes – a hub for the flourishing food-processing industry.
The human urge to travel is not new. According to fourth century Roman wisdom, the world is a book and those who don’t travel read only one page.Global mass tourism, however, is a recent phenomenon – a powerful drug with toxic side effects reaching even the top of Mount Everest. Its rapid spread is driven by the explosive growth of the global middle class, estimated to increase from 1.8b in 2009 to almost 5b in 2030. These new tourists are often escaping what Paulo Coelho describes: “if you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal”.
These long months of enforced immobility are disrupting my own slow-moving industry. The unique charm of immobilier is naturally that buildings are immobile – they don’t come to you. The clue is in the name. As I was considering potential careers in 1989, Hammerson’s chairman, Sydney Mason, explained that charm: “On its best days, working in property is like being paid to be a tourist”. Thirty years later, Mason’s simple and inspiring advice still resonates in a Google Earth world. Despite technology, property people just DO need to travel to buildings.
Users, lenders and investors of buildings in the hospitality sector are finding the current imposed absence of travel particularly painful. Unsurprisingly, hotels are France’s worst performing property investment sector, with BNP estimating occupancy levels down from 70% to 30% and the key barometer of RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) down by a massive 60%. Without international tourist clientele, the biggest losers are upscale hotels, such as the iconic Carlton in Cannes, now closed for an overdue full renovation and scheduled to reopen in 2023.
Covid impacts have imposed a time of reflection for the property industry, and especially around sustainability and our curious relationship to travel. In a more technological and environmentally aware future, real estate is an obvious example of a sector where business travel will be reduced. In measuring their carbon footprints, property businesses, like leisure travellers, have, so far, demonstrated a curious blind spot for aeroplanes. Regulation may change that. The French government has just taken an environmental lead in banning domestic flights to cities such as Bordeaux, Lyon and Nantes where TGV trains offer alternative journeys of less than 2.5 hours.
Covid has seemingly created two distinct and opposing schools of thought about the future of travel. The first is a new ecological reflex, learned during lockdowns, to ask whether a journey is really necessary. The second school is that of the French poet Gustave Nadaud:
“Rester c’est exister, voyager c’est vivre” (To stay is to exist, to travel is to live).
At least for this summer, many will rebound from France’s long vacation from tourism convinced that travelling simply makes us feel alive.
