After months of avoiding the capital, they are once again squatting in the hotels, sidewalks, monuments of Paris…. Catch-up effect after the Olympic Games, reopening of Notre-Dame? Tourists are indeed back according to professionals in the sector.
“This year, their number is much greater than the last time I came. There are a lot more people,” observes Noemi Rizzato, originally from Milan, who braved the cold at the end of December to visit the Place du Trocadéro, bundled up in her down jacket. “We heard all languages spoken, except French in the metro,” confirms Georges Bardot, a 78-year-old retiree from Franche-Comté.
Full hotels and customers with strong purchasing power
This winter, Parisian hotels are full: the reservation rate for the two weeks of Christmas holidays was close to 70% in mid-December, or 9 points more than a year ago, according to MKG data Consulting.
High-end establishments are doing well, with an increase of almost 14 points over one year. Proof, according to the Union of Hotel Trades (Umih), that international customers with strong purchasing power are back.
Images of Paris around the world during the Olympics are finally paying off
The Olympic Games have “made tourists want to either come back or come, given the images”, analyzes Frank Delvau, president of the Paris-Ile-de-France branch of Umih, who sees in these figures a “ JO effect”.
Disappointed by a lackluster summer report, with a sharp drop in activity for restaurants, museums and taxis, tourism professionals were expecting this positive rebound effect. With 5 billion viewers, the Paris Games were the most watched in history, according to the IOC.
“We needed this catch-up effect because the situation was very complicated in the third quarter. With the Olympics, […] there were very significant drops in attendance. The restoration was minus 40%, minus 50% at times,” continues Frank Delvau.
Notre-Dame as the highlight of the end of the year
On the Île de la Cité, where Notre-Dame Cathedral is located, the neighborhood's merchants were impatiently awaiting the return of visitors, after five years of reconstruction work marked by Covid-19 and the drop in tourist numbers.
“The reopening of Notre Dame this year was the most important item on our list. […] It’s a magnificent monument and it was great to see it, to pray there, to visit it,” says Teju Arora, an engineer from the United States, wearing a red beret, the new distinctive sign of Americans “in Paris “.
The first week of its reopening in December, the cathedral welcomed 270,000 visitors in eight days, the rector archpriest of Notre-Dame told the newspaper The Parisian.
A 15.4% increase in international arrivals at airports
Tourists “say to themselves [que] it's time to go to Paris, […] at the same time they have Notre-Dame, the windows of the department stores which always attract a lot of people,” summarized the president of the Umih IDF.
From November 1 to December 8, international air arrivals to Paris recorded an increase of 15.4% compared to 2023, to reach 1.3 million, according to the barometer of the Paris tourist office.
