In 2022, the French are going breaststroke. Between the war in Ukraine, two elections and a seventh wave of Covid-19, they seem determined to take a breather this summer, with a holiday departure rate at an all-time high, despite prices scorching like a July sun. It is as if we had to end two years of the pandemic, as it returns, to catch our breath after several months of inflation and political uncertainty, when they are only just beginning.
The holiday road has rarely been so congested and strewn with pitfalls. Because this appetite comes up against various slimming cures: that of the workforce, in all services related to tourism; that of destinations, since Asia remains difficult to access, two and a half years after the start of the pandemic; that of the stock of rental cars or trains.
“We were expecting a negative demand shock, but we went to a supply shock, and violently”, analyzes Christian Mantei, president of Atout France, the country’s tourism promotion body. So that, in a sector which no longer ignores anything yield management – adaptation of prices to the remaining supply and the imminence of the stay – inflation often promises to be excessive. Overview of the dynamics at work on the eve of the big departures.
The industry takes what there is to take
For the past year, tourism professionals have been taking advantage of the revenge travel (“revenge of the trip”) following repeated confinements. The French can also draw on the savings accumulated since 2020, which the Banque de France underlined, on June 28, that it remains at a very high level.
Finally, behind the full planes, there are credit notes issued during these eighteen months, when international travel suffered many breaks. Many fear that these circumstances will not last and that leisure will once again become, as it has always been, an adjustment variable in household budgets. Hence the need for them to capitalize on this summer when demand is greater than supply. “When the travel budget will have been consumed, in 2023, or from this winter, it will not be the same music”, anticipates René-Marc Chikli, president of the Syndicate of tour-operating companies (SETO). The summer for tour operators will be better than in 2019, with a 15% increase in the basket, mainly linked to the rise in prices.
On all items of tourism expenditure, the increase clearly exceeds inflation in the service sector, estimated at 3.2% in June by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee). There is car fuel, the preferred means of holiday travel for four out of five French people.
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