LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 49

the marketers. This uncertainty only deepens as tourism penetrates into more pockets of
life in France.
Many are reluctant to acknowledge how pervasive tourism has become. Nina Sutton, a
lifelong Parisian and a close friend of mine, is a prime example. She is a first-class journ-
alist and writer who rose in the ranks when women were still rare, living through the ups
and downs of raising two daughters while maintaining a career. Now that her children
are grown, she rents out one of her two adjoining apartments to tourists. Her apartment
in Montmartre is the epitome of late-nineteenth-century Victorian Paris, with her family's
paintings and furnishings evoking that luxurious era. She has no problem renting her flat;
the income is a boon. Yet no one is more eloquent about the downside of tourism than
Nina.
“I worry that we will become commodities in tourism. Motor coaches pollute the air
to stop for five minutes in front of Notre Dame, five minutes at the Tour Eiffel. Herds of
tourists who do not respect or appreciate what they're seeing,” she said.
When I asked her how she squared that with her small tourism operation, she sounded
like the tourism officials I had just interviewed in her city. “My visitors aren't like that at
all. They are precisely the kind of people you want to meet. That is the key to productive
tourism, to respect each other. The British are the best,” she said.
Alain Minc, an economist and close advisor to former President Sarkozy, confirmed
this ambivalence at the highest level. Minc said that he was never able to engage Sarkozy
on the subject of tourism—diplomacy, war and peace, yes, but not tourism even in the
depths of the world crisis of 2009.
“There was never any discussion by the president about the importance of tourism to
the economy, not even during the recession,” said Minc. “I'm convinced with the right
policy we could have even more tourism, but it was not easy to convince him to do more.
He told me, 'We are the number-one tourism place in the world. Why do we need to
change?' ”
Minc said tourism is of sufficient economic importance that French ambassadors
around the globe should consider encouraging tourism part of their portfolios. “Tourism
should be a business of diplomacy. There is nothing more cosmopolitan than tourism,” he
said in his high-ceilinged office with its outsize Richard Avedon portrait of Samuel Beck-
ett. “We have such a competitive advantage.”
But the biggest problem brought on by tourism is the same one threatening many coun-
tries in Europe. What keeps officials awake at night is the fear that too many tourists are
buying second homes in France, a phenomenon that is snowballing and pushing locals
out of their homes. Cities aren't immune. In some neighborhoods of Paris, such as the
popular sixth arrondissement on the Left Bank where I once lived, foreigners are coloniz-
ing apartment buildings and the local café is giving way to brand-name luxury stores like