Stardate 20030809.1529

(On Screen): Things aren't going well right now in France. The economy is in the toilet, so with tax revenues down and entitlement payments up, the government is running a big deficit. This puts France in direct violation of EU guidelines.

One of the reasons is that the French tourism industry is in deep trouble, in particular because Americans have decided that they no longer want to visit. There had been hints that something like this might be coming. I predicted it in April. But just after the war, French business leaders publicly denied that there was any real chance of such a thing. After all, deep down the French and Americans are such wonderful friends. Unfortunately, that came across as "whistling past the graveyard", and in June they began to admit that there was a problem, though they still tried to portray it as being small.

Now it's beyond dispute: it is big and it is important. Of course, there's still spin going on. The explanation you'll hear for why the French tourist industry is in trouble will depend on who you talk to and what their agenda is. There are many who need for it to be some sort of global and temporary reason, because they don't want to face the possibility that French politics and diplomacy are factors, or that it may be a permanent change. And since it's likely that there are many contributing factors anyway, it's easy to try to emphasize some factors and ignore others for propaganda purposes.

It is true that the fall of the dollar relative to the Euro makes European vacations more expensive now for Americans than last year. And tourism everywhere is off. (For instance, international arrivals at the US seem to be down about 8%.) But there seems to be more to it than that, because American tourism to France specifically seems to be down a lot more than the average.

They say that if you want to discover what a politician or bureaucrat truly believes, look at what he does rather than listening to what he says. The French government has clearly been worried about American tourism, because they've been engaged in something of a publicity campaign to try to lure Americans back again. If there's a comparable French program targeting anyone else, or comparable programs by Italy and Spain targeting Americans, I haven't heard of it.

So they rather notoriously hired Woody Allen as a spokesman, though little seems to have come of that. (Perhaps they finally realized how Allen is viewed by most Americans.) And they tried to address the French reputation for being rude to foreigners, especially English-speaking ones. There was a campaign inside France to try to convince French workers in the tourist industry to smile more, and attempts to convince Americans that the French weren't actually arrogant and contemptuous.

It doesn't seem to have worked. It may be that French tourist industry workers are more willing to smile, however insincerely, but they are not being given the opportunity because there are far fewer tourists to smile at.

There has been a massive decline in American tourism to France, though the magnitude of it is open to dispute. There don't seem to be any official figures yet (or at least any that have been released which I've found) and estimates vary all over the map.

Figures just released for July show that visitor rates are down by an average of 20 percent on 2002, with the biggest shortfall made up by absent Americans — staying away because of the Franco-US rift on Iraq and the falling dollar.

Hotels, restaurants and museums in their main destinations — Paris, the Riviera and the World War II landing beaches in Normandy — have all reported a big drop in US visitors, especially the coach parties who constitute the largest and most lucrative part of the market.

"Our colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic are no longer programming in France," lamented Cesar Balderacchi, president of the National Union of Travel Agents, who put the decline in numbers of Americans in the first half of 2003 at a dramatic 80 percent.

Government officials set the figure more optimistically at around 30 percent, noting that last year was itself a high.

Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the official 30% number is probably low:

A brief tour of the centre of Paris yesterday confirmed his fears, with not a busload of camera-wielding Americans or Japanese to be seen.

On a clear, sunny day, the bateaux mouches that ply the Seine were all but empty. Three or four heads stared balefully from an red open-top sightseeing bus.

"Thanks very much, Tony Blair and friends," said the bus conductor.