Gaining currency: fall of euro has American tourists flocking to Europe

Empresário chinês leva 6.400 funcionários a "passear" pela Europa

"BYE BYE EUROPA"

A Turistificação Massiva , Galopante e Global da Europa vai transformá-la num Museu ao Ar Livre e num Palco de Eventos Permanentes Alienante e Alienado, com a expectativa de uma progressiva reacção e crescente hostilidade dos autóctenes, ameaçados no seu espaço vital e Identidade .

OVOODOCORVO

The Louvre in Paris is expecting over 9 million visitors this year and is undergoing a £40m renovation to help deal with the crowds. ‘It’s chaotic and a madhouse inside,’ said one tourist. Photograph: Daniella Nowitz/Corbis

Gaining currency: fall of euro has American tourists flocking to Europe

Shifting exchange rates mean more holidaymakers are making the trip across the Atlantic – but the upsurge brings problems for Europe’s most popular attractions

Jon Henley, Angelique Chrisafis in Paris and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome

Friday 5 June 2015 20.13 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/05/euro-rate-american-tourists-europe-holiday

Last spring, when one US dollar got you a paltry €0.72, Americans visiting to Paris needed to fork out $17 for a €12 entrance ticket to the permanent collections of the Louvre. Today the same ticket will set them back barely $13.

Likewise, a reasonable three-star hotel in Rome: perhaps $350 last year, more like $275 this. Or three courses for two – plus a few beers – in one of an Amsterdam eetcafe: about $100 just 18 months ago but $75 now.

“Europe feels like it’s on sale this year for Americans,” said Barrie Seidenberg, CEO of Viator, a US-based company that allows tourists to pre-book entrance tickets to the big attractions and small-group “jump the queue” tours before leaving home.

As the euro currency sinks ever closer to parity with the dollar, the fact that a European vacation is now about 25% cheaper than it was last year has not escaped the attention of US holidaymakers. Although for some of the old world’s more popular attractions, that could cause problems.

Over the last bank holiday weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported, the Palace of Versailles – despite recently investing €15m to revamp its entrance hall – was forced to post a message on its website asking tourists not already armed with an advance ticket to postpone their visit, or at least to confine it to the gardens.

Versailles, the resplendent centre of French royal power until the 1789 revolution, drew more than 7.5 million visitors to its palace and gardens in 2013.

But even that was comfortably exceeded by the world’s busiest museum, the Louvre, which is expecting to welcome well over 9 million people this year.

Seidenberg said searches and bookings on the company’s site for attractions like the Louvre and the Sistine Chapel in Rome were up by 60%, while advance sales for the Eiffel Tower had soared by 170% this year.

“Paris is on fire,” she said. “But really any place in Europe that people feel is iconic, that they have to see, and especially any place they fear there might be queues ... Much as people want to see the Sistine Chapel, they don’t want to queue for five hours in the Roman sun first.”

Savvier American visitors have already learned that advance booking is now essential. “We planned it all online months ago from the US,” said Cindy Sohn, who is from southern California and visiting Paris with friends.

“We spent two weekends meeting up over a bottle of wine deciding what to do, then I spent a day on museum websites booking everything for scheduled time slots.”

Add to the surging US influx the growing number of Asian (particularly Chinese) holidaymakers eager to tour Europe’s most famous attractions, and it is hard to see how the visitor experience at many of Europe’s more venerable – and overcrowded – landmarks is not going to suffer.

The Palace of Versailles recently asked prospective visitors, who had not bought an advance ticket, to consider postponing their visit. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

Some tourists plainly have a miserable enough time already. “The lines are total chaos with little help from the staff and I couldn’t really advance purchase in this case: the website is terrible,” a recent US visitor to the Eiffel Tower wrote on the travel site Tripadvisor.

Another agreed: “Lines were crazy, people trying to get you to buy things everywhere, trapping you and begging.”

Of the Louvre, one Las Vegas tourist recorded that despite going late in the day, “It’s chaotic and a madhouse inside. It’s very disorganised too, even if you have the map.”

A visitor from Virginia said the museum was “total and utter chaos” and that to see its main draw, the Mona Lisa, visitors should expect to “fight your way through a frenzied crowd pushing and shoving just to get a glimpse of it.”

According to Atout France, the French tourism development agency, a record 3.2 million US tourists visited the country in 2014, encouraged by the euro’s gradual weakening over the course of the year. The number is expected to increase further this year.

Anne-Laure Tuncer, director of the agency’s New York bureau, said early indications were that reservations for some categories of flights to France from the US were up by as much as 7% this April compared with last year. “It’s an indication of the way things are going,” she said.

Tuncer added that a recent Gallup poll showed 82% of Americans had a broadly favourable image of France and the strong dollar-euro exchange rate was “a real bonus”.

The impact should be felt not just in increased tourist numbers, she said, but “in upgrades – people tend to book more excursions, for example, or a better class of hotel. They’re easier with their money.”

Rome’s Sistine Chapel now stays open until nearly midnight for one day each week to help deal with its 6 million visitors a year. Photograph: Musei Vaticani/Ansa/Claudio Peri/EPA

In Venice, Florida-based tour organisers Randall and Dorothy Smith said their business had done well this year because the trips it runs, booked a year in advance with prices locked down in euros, are paid for only 30 days before they begin. “This year has been a banner year,” Randall said. “There’s money to be made.”

For tourist attractions, there is also money to be spent. The Louvre is currently in the throes of a major £40m renovation programme aimed at helping it handle up to 14 million visitors a year – more than three times the number it was getting at the turn of the century.

According to the museum, up to 40,000 people a day now jostle to see the Mona Lisa alone – funnelled towards it by a visitor flow system redesigned last year specifically to reflect the fact that, for many visitors to the Louvre, the enigmatic smile is all they really want to see.

In Amsterdam, the celebrated Rijksmuseum reopened last year after a monumental £275m revamp that should allow it to cope with up to 5 million visitors a year. Along with several other major museums, it is also considering extending its hours (the Louvre, currently closed on Tuesdays, is thinking about staying open seven days a week).

In Rome, the Sistine Chapel, expected to pull in 6 million visitors this year, is now staying open until nearly midnight one day a week.

Even attractions outside city centres are also noticing a rise in US visitors. The Fondation Claude Monet, which runs the impressionist’s house and garden in Giverny, west of Paris, saw 625,000 visitors in the seven months it was open last year, 20% of them from America. “This year, the number of US visitors has already risen – and it’s around 27% of our total so far,” a spokesman said.

Italy

Just outside of Giolitti, one of the oldest gelaterias in Rome and a top tourist attraction, students Navi Atwal and Julia Spencer, both from California, admitted it was the favourable exchange rate that encouraged them to travel in Italy after their study abroad programme in Spain ended for the year.

Spencer said she fully realised just how much the weakened euro helped her finances while she was studying in Spain: her monthly rent in euros stayed the same, but the dollar cheques she was receiving from her parents were buying her more and more.

“I would feel like I had more money by the end of the month – $50 to $70 a month,” she says. “Coming here, I knew I had to be really careful with my money. But then later, as the price went down, I could be a little more flexible,” she said.

Tennessee newlyweds Kevin Maggard and Sharmaine Hunt say they did not come to Italy especially because of the exchange rate, but noted that lots of people at home had mentioned to them that it was a “good time to go. You feel like you can spend a little more money,” Hunt said.

On their first day in the Eternal City prices at lunch seemed “reasonable” and they calculated that an €8 dish would only set them back about $10

In Venice, Pam Sammartino, from Denver, Colorado, said the exchange rate had definitely helped her budget, allowing her to stay at a nicer hotel – one with a pool – than she otherwise would have.

But Franco, a gondolier, said whatever the exchange rate, people were spending less money than they used to. The day of long lunches and gondola rides have been replaced by take-out pizza by the slice and public transport, he said.

France

Like hundreds of others, Scott Sohn, a building contractor from southern California and his wife, Cindy, had been queuing for over half an hour to climb the bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral. “We got here well before opening time to stand in line because in the afternoon the line is twice as long,” he said.

The Sohns and their fellow holidaymakers, the Phillipses from Palm Springs, are seasoned travellers from previous trips spent fighting the crowds in Rome. They had seen scores of pre-planned sights from the Normandy D-day beaches to their special queue-jumping pass and guide at the Louvre.

“There were such crowds in front of the Mona Lisa that you had to push and shove to get close,” Cindy said. “If I was a first time visitor from the US and I went there on my own, I’m not sure what kind of impression I’d have. There’s a lot of pushing and a lot of tight corners,” Cohn said.

At the Louvre, the crowd in front of the Mona Lisa is now almost as famous as the painting. “I took a photo of people taking photos of the Mona Lisa,” said Jon Gabrielson, a major in English and history.

Further back in the queue, Rachel Tierney, an English major from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, said the impressionists at the Musée d’Orsay had proved tricky due to the wall of people taking selfies in front of the works of Degas. “You couldn’t see anything, we were 30 feet away from the pantings.”

Maggie Finch, an English major in the same group of friends, had been “very surprised” in London to have to queue for half an hour to get a picture of platform nine and three quarters at Kings Cross station. Likewise, Paris’s recently restored gothic chapel La Sainte-Chapelle was stunning “but if you turned around you bumped into other tourists”.

Most felt the queues in Paris were small-fry compared to Italy. “Rome was far worse,” sighed a pensioner from Texas waiting to get into Notre Dame.