One of the top touristy city in the World: Paris, France

Now that we studied Seoul and went a little deeper in the subject of cultural adaptation, it’s time to move on to another global city, the capital of France: Paris.

Before going into details and for you to understand the importance of tourism for this city, we’ll start by giving you some information and numbers about the tourism industry in Paris.

Around the World, Paris is seen as a romantic city

Paris is a highly touristy city. It welcomes around 18 million foreign visitors per year. Among that number, more than 68% of it are English, American, Italian, Spanish, German or Japanese (Mairie de Paris, 2010). British (13.2%), American (11.7%), and Spanish (9.9%) are the first three international clientele of the destination (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013).

The welcome of foreign tourists is considered as a major priority for the city of Paris. A 7 million Euros grant is yearly given to the Paris Tourist Office. Its website is available in 11 different languages, European languages: French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, all the languages spoken in the neighboring countries, and Asian languages: Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. This shows the willingness of the city to adapt to its foreign visitors and to inform them the best possible way.

Tourism is the economic backbone of the capital. It generates 300 000 jobs, directly and indirectly. On average, foreign tourists’ expenses in Paris generate around 10 billion euros per year.

Paris is a highly coveted destination for business trips, meetings and events. In 2009, it was the world leading destination for conventions (tied with Vienna) and is still the leader for fairs and exhibitions. 40% of foreign visitors go to Paris for business reasons (Mairie de Paris, 2010).

According to the ranking made by Mastercard of the most visited cities in the World, Paris is ranked 3^rd after Bangkok and London (Dufour, A., 2013).

Now that you know a little bit about tourism in Paris and its economic importance for the city, will try to analyze, in following articles, what adjustments the city is carrying out to adapt to foreigners.

As an introduction, we can first mention the project launched recently (June 2013) by the Regional Tourism Committee and Chamber of Commerce of Paris, called “Do you speak touriste ?” (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013).

The objective of this project is to improve the quality of the hospitality and welcome of business owners towards foreign visitors. Indeed, the quality of reception is a key factor of competitiveness for a highly touristy city and Paris reputation abroad, in terms of hospitality, is unsatisfactory. In comparison with others major touristy cities like London, business owners in Paris have a poor mastery of foreign languages, insufficient knowledge about manners and tourists’ expectancies… (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013). This initiative seems to be discerning to me as, going back to the recent questionnaire that we conducted among foreign students (see previous article), we noticed that negative comments about the city of Paris were about the behavior of French people and business owners.

Professionals need to be prepared to meet, at the best, foreign customers’ needs. That is why, for this project, a guide and a website have been created to help Parisian business owners improve their knowledge about foreign visitors and make them learn basics of some foreign languages (Do you speak touriste ?, 2013).

Those tools contain information about:
- Foreigners’ expenses, length of their stay, manners and their expectations according to their nationality;
- The most visited spots in Paris, actuality about local events, leisure and culture;
- Important numbers relative to tourism in the Parisian region and basic notions of foreign languages so that professionals can communicate better with their customers.

Do you speak touriste ? 2013, June. 

The city of Paris seems to have identified a strong issue it has regarding the welcome of foreigner visitors and it is trying to fix it, creating and launching projects like the one described in this article. On following articles, I’ll identify other events or project the city is carrying out to adjust to foreigners. I’ll also write articles about transportation and other facilities composing a global city like we previously did with Seoul.

References

Mairie de Paris. 2010, September 30^th. Le tourisme.

Retrieved from: http://www.paris.fr/politiques/les-politiques-parisiennes/le-tourisme/rub_9706_stand_82756_port_24008

Dufour, A., BFM TV. 2013, June. Paris, troisième destination touristique au monde.

Retrieved from: http://www.bfmtv.com/economie/paris-troisieme-destination-touristique-monde-538834.html

L’espace professionnel à la destination Paris, Ile-de-France. 2013, June. Do you speak touriste ?

Retrieved from: http://www.tourismepro-paris-idf.com/do-you-speak-touriste/

Do you speak touriste ? 2013. La clientèle internationale.

Retrieved from: http://www.doyouspeaktouriste.fr/tourisme_idf.php

Foreigner's perception of global cities

Along this blog, we already studied how the city of Seoul is accessible to foreigners and we are planning to do the same thing with Canada and the city of Paris.

To go further into the topic of this blog we thought that collecting the impressions and opinions of tourists, expatriates, etc. might add value to the analyses carried out. That is why, we created questionnaires that has been sent to classmates that lived for a short time (around 3 months) in those cities/countries. The respondents of these questionnaires are French, Canadian, Chinese and Korean.

The goal of this survey is to give us an insight about the way some foreigners “felt” living in those cities and their perception about the efforts Seoul, Paris and Canada are making to adapt to them.

Of course, because adaptation to a country/culture is different depending on the culture of origin, we will try to analyze the different answers according to the nationalities of the respondents. For example, it seems normal that westerners will have less trouble adjusting to a western country different from theirs than an Asian person.

A caricature of the World seen by Americans. 2012, February 12^th. Retrieved from: My wonderful life. http://alison-staples.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-do-you-see-world.html

To see the different questionnaires, click on the links below:

 - Questionnaire about the city of Seoul: http://fr.surveymonkey.com/s/QS5K8CB

 - Questionnaire about the city of Paris: http://fr.surveymonkey.com/s/Q68NZQ6

 - Questionnaire about Canada: http://fr.surveymonkey.com/s/QZDQBDW

The results

You’ll find below a general overview of the results obtained to this survey. Detailed results will come later on, in following articles.

I decided to split the results into three categories: the answers obtained regarding the place itself and its facilities; the answers got about the local culture and the comparison between the three destinations.

If you have any comment to make, share your opinion or experiences, etc. please feel free to leave a comment on this article or the previous ones.

The city/country and its facilities

The survey was containing several questions about the places themselves and their facilities. One of the questions asked about the troubles experienced by the respondent while doing daily life activities (eating, shopping, visiting, moving).

The activities where most of the respondents encountered trouble while living in those three different places were eating in restaurant and going grocery shopping while very few had to face difficulties using public transportation or visiting touristic spots.

These answers could demonstrate that, because of a high level of tourism in those destinations, public transportation and touristic spots are arranged for foreigners, which would be why almost no trouble was faced for these two activities.

The local culture

As we’ve seen in previous articles, it exists several ways to adapt to a foreign culture such as: assimilation and integration (see the article posted on July, 22^nd, “How state policies can influence on the attractiveness of their country abroad?”). To identify which acculturation process the respondents went through, a question in the survey asked which cultural habits they adopted or kept between their birth ones and local ones.

In those three situations, both westerners and easterners kept their cultural habits and adopt some of the local culture. This behavior can, of course, being explained by the fact that respondents only stayed in those places for a short period so they did not want to put aside their own culture. But it has been noticed that none of the respondents kept their cultural habits without adopting some of the local ones which shows the interest, that people living abroad have, in discovering new cultures.

Before going through the acculturation process individuals staying in an unknown country experience a culture shock. This term “culture shock” was first introduced by the anthropologist Kalvero Oberg in 1954. You’ll find below his definition of a culture shock:

“Culture shock is precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse. These signs or cues include the thousand and one ways in which we orient ourselves to the situations of daily life: when to shake hands, […], how to make purchases, when to accept and when to refuse invitations, when to take statements seriously and when not. Now these cues which may be words, gestures, facial expressions, customs, or norms are acquired by all of us in the course of growing up and are as much a part of our culture as the language we speak or the beliefs we accept. All of us depend for our peace of mind and our efficiency on hundreds of these cues, most of which we do not carry on the level of conscious awareness.”

According to the different answers obtained for this question, we saw that culture shocks have been experienced in France and South Korea, by both westerners and easterners whereas only easterners faced a culture shock in Canada. The common reply regarding the reasons for these culture shocks is language barrier. Indeed, as we saw in previous articles, language is very important has it is the main element of communication. Not speaking the local language makes adaptation harder and slower as the access to the host culture become difficult. These responses reinforce what we said in previous articles about the importance of translations in public places, menus in restaurants, different panels and signs, etc. The multiple translations (to English, Mandarin and Japanese) in Seoul are really appreciated by foreigners. It makes them feel welcome and it prevent them from feeling lost.

Comparison

In order to compare the three destinations, the respondents were asked to grade those places according to the accessibility of the local culture and adaptability to the local life. The degree of simplicity to live as a foreigner in those three destinations has also been asked.

The answers to this part will be given in the future, once articles about the city of Paris and Canada will be published. So watch out this blog if you want to know more about it!

Conclusion

These questionnaires demonstrated, once again, that the first step in adjusting to foreign cultures is to offer various translations of key information. This show how much language is important to integrate or be integrated within a culture.

Culture shocks are experienced by every single individuals living in a foreign country but the intensity of this shock changes from one person to another depending on its birth culture, its host culture, its adaptability to unknown situations, etc. Adjustments carried out by cities and countries to make information, facilities and the local culture accessible to foreigners also play a major role in the intensity of the culture shock experienced.

The answers given to this survey also confirm the fact that is it easier for Westerners to adapt to Western culture than for Easterners and vice versa.