For summer 2020, New Aquitaine thinks “short circuit tourism”

• While in New Aquitaine, restaurants, campsites and hotels fear the white season, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne wanted to be reassuring, this Friday.
• The Secretary of State to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs assured that the recovery plan was underway and stressed that tourism was however "going to be different this year".
• According to him, "domestic customers will be the engine of this summer" summer and summer will rhyme with local tourism and French visitors.

Tourism in New Aquitaine represents 150,000 direct jobs, 400,000 indirect jobs, 20,000 businesses and 9% of regional GDP. At the dawn of deconfinement, it may seem normal for professionals in the sector to show a taut chouïa at the prospect of a white season. "Aware", he said, of "the anxiety" linked to the lack of prospects, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, Secretary of State to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, recently assured that restaurateurs or hoteliers could think to the recovery… knowing that “tourism would be completely different this year”. During a press conference call co-hosted with Alain Rousset, President of the Region, the government representative spoke of a revival orchestrated by health rules, “complementarity between destinations” and the “short circuit”.

"Reasonable and reasoned" tourism

Post-May 11, the “deconfines” and tourism professionals will have to follow the guides to good sanitary practices to the letter to avoid returning home. “Each week, I meet the Industry Committee. New Aquitaine is well represented since Roland Heguy, president of Umih is invited, as is chef Philippe Etchebest, said Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. We are working in real time on the support plan and are trying to help the sector get through this difficult milestone. "

The pressure is great, since in New Aquitaine, only 2% of 1,700 hotels are open and only 1% of 9,400 restaurants have redeployed to take-out. And already 3,780 tourist companies benefit from the loan guaranteed by the State, for an amount of 296 million. "We know there is an urgent need and I understand this anxiety of not having prospects," continued Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. We will however have to wait fifteen to twenty days after May 11 to see the first effects of the deconfinement and really prepare for the season. "According to the representative of the executive, who fears" a renewed epidemic "," nothing would be worse than to take the risk to the professionals to recruit seasonal workers or to make stocks to realize finally that the date could not be honored ”.

Same speech on the side of Alain Rousset. The boss of the Region effectively argued in favor of a "controlled reopening" and hoped that New Aquitaine could be a "land of experimentation on a reasoned and reasonable reopening". And to recall that the arrival of tourists "could create clusters" in a region where "only" 4,537 cases of Covid-19 have been identified since the beginning of the epidemic. "Tourism operators need visibility, of course, but we will not be able to reopen large sites such as Lascaux and the aquariums in La Rochelle or Biarritz without visibility of health constraints," said Alain Rousset. "The notion of gauge will necessarily be present in campsites as in restaurants," added Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. The guide to good restaurant practice mentions, for example, a table that cannot exceed eight people. "

“Short circuit” tourism

In the summer of 2020, "domestic customers will be the engine of this season," said the Secretary of State to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs. According to him, the tourist offices have already reworked their offers towards "proximity, local or regional basins", or "short circuit tourism". Wine tourism, hydrotherapy [second region of France], as well as business tourism could thus fare well in New Aquitaine… all the more so as flights are expected to spread “gradually in mid-May” . For his part, Alain Rousset imagines "taking advantage of this sequence" to "innovate and focus on sustainable tourism" and ecological. And since New Aquitaine is the leading region in France in terms of outdoor accommodation [campsites represent 40% of commercial beds, 1,350 establishments and 143,000 pitches], the territory could benefit from a great advance knowing that, according to Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, the bungalows could reopen at the end of May, "if the collective spaces are well organized, even condemned".

Fabienne Buccio, the prefect @ PrefAquitaine33: “We talk a lot about deconfinement on May 11 but it would be more judicious and precise to say that from this date, we will experience another form of confinement rather than a total deconfinement of the day on the next day "

Tourism without competition between regions

Exit foreign tourists, this summer New Aquitaine, which was one of the first regions to communicate on the now famous "Staying at home today is being able to travel tomorrow", will have to bet on Savoyard or Lot-et-Garonnais. According to Alain Rousset, there will be no question of entering a competition between regions "to steal tourists" and to cut the biggest part of the cake. "It will take a national effort and focus on social tourism, to address people who will have experienced this confinement more harshly," said Alain Rousset, before evoking "the most modest people and single women with two or three children ”.

. @ atout_france provides French #tourism stakeholders with an international and national #benchmark on health protection measures likely to facilitate, as soon as possible, a resumption of tourist activity.
👉https: //t.co/1zxNYuO6sv pic.twitter.com/nxAmMdCL5j

To avoid war between destinations and "rather highlight complementarities", the government asked the Atout France agency to coordinate regional campaigns and focus communication on prevention. “Before thinking about promotion, you have to work on information. The tourists will have to continue to take precautions because it will be necessary to spend the summer with the virus ”, hammered Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne. In a few weeks, New Aquitaine should also have listed its available tourist offer. "Some establishments will not reopen and others will have degraded offers," said Alain Rousset. All this information must be quickly accessible on the Internet so that everyone can make their reservations. "

Facing the regions more widely affected by the Covid-19 epidemic, New Aquitaine and its Lascaux cave or its towers of La Rochelle will have a card to play this summer. Especially since it will be potentially easy to maintain the regulatory distances between the towels on its 720 km of coastline. The interministerial tourism committee, chaired by Edouard Philippe, is due to meet on May 14 in Matignon. The full recovery plan will be revealed in the process and New Aquitaine should be able to know how to stay the second most visited region by the French.

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