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