LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 46

the world. Germans and the British are the most numerous by far. Americans rank eighth
but are falling behind.
“By 2020 more Chinese will visit France than Americans,” said Christian Delom, also
of ATOUT. “That means we have to make many changes . . . more Chinese-French res-
taurants, Chinese speakers in luxury-goods stores, and monitoring Chinese tour agencies.”
These tourists are spending money throughout the economy. Marco Marchetti, of the
Ministry of Culture, gave me a 2009 study showing that heritage tourism, by the French
and foreigners, contributed $20 billion to the French economy. It was important data to
have as the government began slashing budgets during the Great Recession and culture
looked vulnerable. The study showed a solid return on the government investment and
that rather than costing money, “protected heritage is an important source of jobs and rev-
enue.”
When the global recession hit in 2008, all European governments reexamined their
budgets, cutting back across the board. In France, though, the Culture Ministry's budget
was spared the worst. In 2010, France actually increased its culture budget by 2.7 percent,
while most European countries were slashing theirs. Frédéric Mitterrand, the minister of
culture, said this showed that “the cultural offering is a determining element in our attract-
iveness as a country and its economic development.”
Adding to the culture budget reflects the overall design of French tourism. In the age
of global homogeneity, when a luxury shopping mall in Dubai looks an awful lot like the
new malls in Shanghai, French tourism is definitely and obsessively moving in the oppos-
ite direction. It is concentrating on what is unique, digging down, not flattening out, and
betting on what can never be outsourced.
All the other tourism policies flow from this: avoiding mass tourism, tying the country
together with efficient public transportation, taking advantage of often impossibly rigorous
environmental regulations, and leaving it up to the locals to decide what's best for them.
“We rejected the models found in Spain and Morocco of resorts with everything in-
cluded, especially beach resorts. It goes against who we are. Our accent is on cultural tour-
ism, on local tourism. We make great efforts to oblige tourists to meet French people. Sure
we have the Riviera and Deauville, but they are the exception,” said Delom, director of
strategy for the French tourism agency.
I stumbled across an unexpected example of this a few years earlier when I interviewed
the deputy secretary of planning at the French Ministry of Agriculture about a completely
different trade issue. Behind his desk I noticed three large colored maps; two seemed out
of place. One traced the passenger train lines spread across France like overlapping spider
webs. The second was sprinkled with symbols representing the annual cultural events. The
third was a typical topographical map showing arable lands.
Alain Moulinier, then the deputy minister, explained that the maps showed how agri-
culture and tourism need each other. “Tourism brings in three times more money than