Rémy Knafou, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Paris 1- Panthéon-Sorbonne, was the guest of Europe Evening on Saturday.

For this specialist, the tourism industry, which is going through the most serious crisis in its history because of Covid-19, must give up mass logic.

INTERVIEW

Will the tourism industry be able to recover from the shock linked to the Covid-19 epidemic? An outbreak of contaminations in several European countries, in particular France, Spain and Portugal, raises fears that the sector will be shut down again by the end of the summer. For Rémy Knafou, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Paris 1- Panthéon-Sorbonne and co-founder of the International Geography Festival of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, the tourism industry cannot afford to start again on the same bases as 'before the pandemic. It must begin its transformation to move from mass tourism to tourism more concerned with environmental concerns.

"The shock was extremely hard since the tourism industry had to face an almost total shutdown of flows. It is an unprecedented shock in the history of tourism, since even the world wars had not resulted in a such an interruption ", notes at the microphone of

Europe Soir

Rémy Knafou.

"It's a shock from which this industry will have to recover. It will have no choice and at the same time, it will not have the choice either to try not to start again as before," points out he does.

"There is a need to regulate tourism"

"Growth as it was until 2019, and which was exponential growth, does not correspond to sustainable tourism", continues our geographer. "There is a need to regulate tourism, to prevent certain areas which are not yet touristy or which are not very touristy from becoming so excessively."

Because for Rémy Knafou, mass tourism has disastrous ecological consequences in certain territories, but also generates phenomena of economic dependence when entire regions only live from the influx of visitors.

"Tourism has already invested vast territories which are beginning to find that they are too dependent on tourism. The Covid-19 crisis makes them feel extremely strongly this weight of tourism when tourists, suddenly, no longer come", observes- he does.

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The example of Venice, trapped in a tourist "vicious circle"

Rémy Knafou cites the example of Venice, whose images, during the first confinement in Italy, were widely circulated on social networks and in the media. The city, completely emptied of its visitors, then offered an almost unprecedented face, with canals that became limpid again for lack of gondolas and vaporettos to stir up the mud. Even before the start of the pandemic, and for several years already, the inhabitants of the Serenissima had already been seeking to curb the activity of cruise passengers. Adopted Tuesday, a decree provides for prohibiting from August 1 to the largest cruise ships access to the historic center.

However, the city cannot afford to undermine its tourist activity.

"Without tourists' money, the Venetian economy is not viable. We saw until 2019 that it was the Venetians themselves who increasingly put on the tourist market accommodation which, from this in fact, were removed from the general rental market ", remarks our specialist.

"It's not just the external system, it's also the Venetian society, the greed that puts the city in a vicious circle. We can see how much we are caught in contradictions to manage this guy. In the end, the solutions lie mainly in political courage. "

Be content with current tourist capacities

"We have to exploit the reception capacities as they exist while trying to avoid what has been the permanent temptation in the recent history of tourism, that is to say the headlong rush, building without stopping new beds, constantly developing new spaces ... ", continues Rémy Knafou. "The challenge is to reconcile at the same time the desire that we have to go to other spaces, to elsewhere, to other societies and at the same time to take into account a necessary ecological transition."