LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 30

park by turning it into a new tourist destination, or buying up miles of beaches in Central
America for a green tourist resort, or even declaring the homely bogs of Ireland a national
treasure and putting it on the tourist trail.
No country better exemplifies the power and unstoppable force of tourism than France.
No other country has tried harder to harness the tourism beast and avoid its downsides.
And no other country has climbed to the top of the heap doing as well as France has.
Yet publicly the French government underplays the role of tourism in its economy, pre-
ferring to leave it invisible. Depending on tourism makes the French slightly uneasy or
ambivalent, as if they are selling themselves. You rarely hear the French president or prime
minister praising tourism as the country's single biggest economic engine; on the contrary,
they are more likely to use the word in a pejorative sense, and while the French govern-
ment has thousands of bureaucrats working in tourism, there is no senior-level minister of
tourism. But there is a secretary of state for tourism, a second-tier cabinet position and an
expanding national tourism agency, ATOUT France.
This is an expression of the uncomfortable fact that tourism is seen in France and much
of the world as lightweight, a business that makes serious money but on its face doesn't
seem as important as, say, making airplanes or running international banks. It is a ques-
tion of face, or pride. Travel and tourism may be the world's biggest industry, it may be
everyone's favorite pastime, a sign of how wealthy we all have become, but it doesn't it the
self-image of a country like France.
France is the nation of Napoleon, a former empire with colonies that stretched around
the globe. For the last fifty years the French government has worked fanatically to remain
a major player on the world scene: to insure French remains a universal language of dip-
lomacy; to hold on to one of the five permanent seats at the United Nations Security
Council and, as a nuclear power with the world's fifth-largest economy, to remain a mem-
ber of the most elite gatherings, attending the political and economic forums. The French
are willing to pay the price for that status, turning out some of the world's best-trained and
-educated people and maintaining their top industries and building modern transportation
systems.
Yet the multibillion-euro travel and tourism industry in France brings in more money
than any other single sector, whether luxury goods, fashion, agriculture, weapons or air-
planes—even if it doesn't it the high-powered profile of France.
“At a minimum, tourism accounts for seven percent of the national product—it is the
premier source for our balance of payments, but despite all of this economic power it is
always viewed poorly by the public,” said Philippe Maud'hui, the senior planning official
at ATOUT France.
He tried to explain the paradox of the government which, behind the scenes, under-
stands the critical importance of tourism to the economy and the popular French culture
that considers tourism a less-than-noble profession. You could say they are snobs about it.