Paris (AFP)

France no longer hopes to achieve in 2020 its target of 100 million foreign tourists welcomed, leaded by the "yellow vests" but also the prospect of Brexit that curbs the arrival of British tourists.

In an annex to the draft budget 2020, dedicated to tourism and available on the website of the Ministry of Action and Public Accounts, it is indicated that the Hexagon maintains its target of 100 million, but that it is "however pushed back , given the current situation, at 2022 ".

"The indicators for the first months of 2019 suggest a decrease in international tourist traffic for the first half of the year," says the document.

"A trend that is largely explained by the national-scale social movements that affected the country at the beginning of the year and affected [the] medium and long-term reservations, as well as the effects of the drop in the pound, the United Kingdom being our first tourist market ", is it indicated.

The objective of welcoming 100 million international visitors in 2020 - against 89 million in 2018 - was set in 2014 by Laurent Fabius, then foreign minister, before the attacks of 2015 which caused an air hole for tourism and broken the progression of attendance.

The government is also reducing its target for 2019: foreign tourist traffic is now expected to reach 91 million, against a forecast of 94 million visitors initially planned by the government and which is now the target on which it plans for 2020.

- "Tourist receipts do not regress" -

In the first half of the year, for the Paris-Ile-de-France region alone, hotel visits by foreign customers declined by 0.5%, according to data from the Regional Tourism Committee.

British tourist arrivals alone show a clear decline over the period, with 304,000 overnight stays.

At the end of August, Valérie Pécresse, president of the Ile-de-France region, had already identified the two "handicaps" that constituted "the social movements that occupied the Parisian tourist ground practically every Saturday for weeks, and also the effects of the Brexit that had an impact on British tourism ".

But she stressed that the trend was "reversed" at the beginning of the summer, thanks to the Women's Football World Cup or the Air Show at Le Bourget.

At the national level, the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) had already indicated that the impact of demonstrations related to "yellow vests" had made a clear impact on the tourism sector from December 2018 first quarter of 2019, with a 4.8% decline in hotel attendance by foreign visitors.

In the second quarter, the institute reported an improvement, with a rise of 3.8% of this international clientele.

INSEE will publish only in early November its tourist numbers for the third quarter of 2019.

Regarding tourist spending, the annex to the draft budget stresses that, "despite" the drop in attendance in the first half, "international tourism receipts do not decline, allowing to expect to reach the target set by the government for 2020 ", or 60 billion euros.

© 2019 AFP