Post by FWS on Jun 23, 2014 13:42:48 GMT -6
France seeks to shed reputation for rudeness to woo tourists
By Hugh Carnegy in Paris
Financial Times
une 22, 2014
Queueing to go up the Eiffel Tower with her husband and two children, Monica Krishan from Delhi pulls few punches about being a foreign tourist in Paris.
“We have just come from Barcelona and Madrid. To put it bluntly the people there are much friendlier compared to France. In Spain they maybe speak less English than here but they really try,” Ms Krishan said.
“Yesterday we took a wrong turn out of our hotel looking for the Metro and asked someone for help. They just looked at our faces and said: ‘No English’.”
France has long suffered from a reputation for extending a surly welcome to visitors, from haughty waiters in Paris cafés to frequent public service strikes. Just this month, the train network has been hit by a prolonged bout of industrial action.
There is even a recognised psychological disorder called “Paris syndrome” that afflicts some tourists, particularly Japanese shocked by the abrupt ways of their French hosts.
But the Socialist government, desperately seeking ways to inject new life into the stuttering economy, is rolling out a plan to transform the tourist industry – not least by addressing the delicate issue of treating holidaymakers with a little more grace.
“If there is one issue we have to deal with, it is to change the mentality of the French who see service as servitude. We are very bad at service in France,” declared Jean-François Rial, boss of Voyageurs du Monde, a specialist travel agency, at a conference held by the government last week to launch its new programme.
Ministers admit part of the problem has been that France, blessed with the splendour of Paris, the Côte d’Azur and the Alps, has tended to take tourism for granted. It attracts the biggest number of foreign visitors a year of any country in the world, hitting 83m in 2012, according to the UN’s world tourism organisation.
The industry accounts for more than 7 per cent of national income, about 2m jobs and contributes €12bn a year to the balance of payments. But this compares with the 12 per cent of global output accounted for by tourism. France earns less from foreign tourism than neighbouring Spain, despite having 20m more visitors a year.
The government’s aim is to boost the number of visitors to 100m a year. Fleur Pellerin, minister for foreign trade and tourism, says the country could create 500,000 jobs if it captured 5 per cent of the anticipated growth in global tourism of 1bn people by 2030.
“It is a major economic challenge,” she says.
The plan includes moves to upgrade the hotel sector, ease the visa process and finally build an express rail link from Paris to the city’s principal airport.
There are attemptsto crack down on high levels of crime targeting tourists in Paris – which has particularly hit the fast-growing number of Chinese visitors – and to improve the quality of internet services for those planning holidays in France.
But a big part of the effort will be to improve the quality of service – including in restaurants. Ms Pellerin says surveys show France ranks badly versus other countries, not just for general service but also, shockingly for the home of haute cuisine, for food.
“It is very symptomatic. People have a vision of great French cuisine and our great chefs. They expect their experience of everyday food to be good, but sometimes it is not,” she says.
As for service, it is not something that can be fixed by decree, she says. “It is a big issue, covering language but also friendliness. We need to work on it via training and building the self-esteem of people who work with tourists.”
But by no means do all tourists complain. At the Eiffel Tower, Liaw Chuewei from Singapore says she and her group of six siblings and friends, visiting after a trip to Amsterdam and Brussels, like Paris best. “We heard that people can be unfriendly here but mostly they have been very nice.”
Takeshi Yoshikawa, from Tokyo, on a five-day visit with a friend, is another satisfied customer: “Paris is very beautiful. We are having a good time. In the restaurants, the service has been good and the food is excellent. Our hotel is fine, too.” No sign of Paris syndrome.
