Lhe perpetuation of our travels and vacations raises a series of democratic, ecological and economic challenges. However, the first challenge to be met lies in the respective values that our imaginations attribute to them. The holiday imagination of the French is modest, popular: affinity and neighborhood, idleness and reunions. With the bit of disdain deemed necessary, tourism professionals call this “domestic tourism”. The imagination of travel is at first sight, for some, more desirable: planes streaking the sky, heavenly hotels, large metropolises and wonders of the world. But the pandemic, the reality of practices and environmental challenges are now challenging the hold of tourism imaginaries.
Spring 2020: planes on the ground, hotels closed, large cities deserted, catastrophic speeches and confinement. Summer 2020: rural areas, parks and natural sites have never been so popular. Admittedly, 55% of French people went on vacation during the summer of 2020. But the average of summer departures has varied from 60 to 65% since the 1990s. Admittedly, among these 55%, 94% chose (a little forced) the France. But this is in no way a break: French summer visitors were already more than 85% to make this choice before the pandemic. (Gael Chareyron, Saskia Cousin and Sébastien Jacquot, “ Tourism crisis and holiday resistance. Values and practices of leisure mobility in times of pandemic », Worlds of Tourism n°20, 2021) The French have favored rest, reunions. These are the two main motivations for going on vacation since surveys on this subject have existed. They would have shunned the hotels? But more than half went to family or friends before the pandemic. They were simply invisible to tourism industry indicators.
Collective right and an individual duty
Thus, until 2020, the World Tourism Organization welcomed each year the increase in the number of “international tourists” – 1.4 billion in 2019. However, these are not tourists, nor even people, but of “international arrivals”, all reasons taken together and concerning a small number of extremely mobile people. Indeed, it is estimated that only around 250 million people fly for leisure each year. Because if the quest for free time and the desire for adventure are universal, only 5% of humanity has ever flown. France, which readily proclaims to be the “first country visited in the world”, is, in reality, simply the most crossed country…
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