Parisians, the party is over. One day, we would have to queue again to enter the Louvre, and that day has arrived. Tourists are back, returning in concentric circles: first from France, then from neighboring countries, then from all over Europe and the Middle East. In the fall of 2021, the Americans resumed their place.
Since the beginning of April, sunny days, the end of the disorganization linked to the Omicron variant and the growth of air links have combined to return the tourist districts of the capital to a semblance of normality.
Around the Eiffel Tower or the Trocadéro, the confinements seemed to have lasted longer than elsewhere. These neighborhoods, extinguished in the absence of tourist clusters, find only their daily lives and their daytime residents: the exiled sellers of plastic Eiffel towers, selfie sticks and sunglasses, and those who buy them; the wooden horses of the carousel, and those who ride them; the Parisian “tuk-tuks”, and those who use them. The “iron lady” is again a tower of Babel where no one speaks the same language but where everyone seems to understand each other.
Reappear trades in strong loss of attractiveness for two years: cap player and accomplices, street pickpocket, seller of padlocks on the Sédar-Senghor footbridge and accordionist of the Saint-Louis bridge.
Until the end of the month, the reservation calendar on the Eiffel Tower website sparkles with orange dots, which mean “last places available”, while it is necessary to anticipate the visits to the Louvre of forty-eight hours minimum.
Quieter weeks
Jean-François Martins, who chairs the Société d’exploitation de la tour Eiffel, observes the counters with the calm of old troops. Compared to pre-Covid, it is still missing one in five visitors. Over the Easter weekend, the tower was visited by 22,000 people each day, nearing its maximum capacity when things are going well – which rarely happens, as the building is showing its age and is currently having its facade ripped off.
The weeks, excluding school holidays, are calmer, a sign that distant visitors and group tourism, which occupy the off-peak hours, are still desired. If a good part of France rediscovered its emblem during the pandemic, locals still make up a quarter of visitors, double the normal. Next come the Americans (12%), who do good for the luxury industry. For a time, professionals feared a push-back effect from the war in Ukraine, on the grounds that North American customers would place kyiv in the suburbs of Paris; It has not happened.
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