LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 39

dustry to organize tourism so it didn't distort society, pollute the country or turn liveli-
hoods upside down. They created a planning process that is painstakingly tedious. Bureau-
crats, committees, reviews, studies, analyses, more reviews, studies and analyses, then new
policies to be implemented, reviewed and studied. But they are happy with this singular
approach.
“It is much better to do tourism with the same eye, one supporting the other,” said Phil-
ippe Maud'hui. That is the price of aiming for the high end of tourism, not necessarily
the rich but those who will leave France better than they found it. Since every country is
looking for the same mix, France is attracting attention from other ministries of tourism
asking if the French have found the answer for good tourism or a momentary sweet spot.
• • •
Bordeaux is wine—the grand, expensive red wine of connoisseurs. The prized vineyards
begin inside the city limits of Bordeaux and spread in all directions—south, east, north and
west—through suburbs and villages, flat plains, soft ridges and knots of pine trees, hugging
both banks of the Gironde River, which flows into the nearby Atlantic Ocean. Nothing is
too good for these fields of stubby, carefully pruned vines that have enriched the famously
tight-fisted and conservative Catholic elite of Bordeaux for centuries. They once traded
barrels of their red wine for wool, cotton, spice and sugar at the river port in the heart of
Bordeaux City, in front of the customs house when trade with the new world and Africa
made it one of the busiest European ports on the Atlantic. Today the wine is bottled and
labeled and then shipped in cases to nations around the globe; a single bottle of the best
premier cru can sell for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. While French fashion, films,
art and architecture have their ups and downs, French wine has remained the standard
against which all other wines are measured. And Bordeaux is at the top of the heap.
Until recently Bordeaux was the antithesis of tourism. Yet I had come to Bordeaux with
my husband at the strong suggestion of officials in Paris and New York. I had asked them
to name the best example of the future direction of tourism in France—a region that has
put in place all the elements they talked about at length during my interviews with them.
I was surprised at the answer:
“Bordeaux—thanks to Alain Juppé, that is where you can see the future of tourism.”
“Juppé has given us a work of art in Bordeaux.”
“Bordeaux. Alain Juppé is bringing it up to the level of a major destination, like
Florence, Italy.”
This sounded as unlikely as saying Savannah, Georgia, was the future of the American
tourist market. When I had lived in France in the late 1980s, raising two young children
there, Bordeaux had the reputation of a boring, faded beauty, its former glory hidden be-