Caravan Vacations

Written by Riviera Reporter

Are The Whingers Wrong?

"With great respect, Mr Editor, if you believe that the well-to-do Britons we try to attract here are better behaved than their downmarket cousins who go to Spain or Greece (Meadia, issue 105), then plainly you have never rented property to them.

I do share the Reporter’s outrage that a pizza should cost 9.95 euros in Antibes compared to only 5.85 euros in Biarritz. However I doubt it is possible to find a decent pizza in that Atlantic town.

Finally, anybody who has visited Nice Airport recently may be forgiven for questioning the hoteliers‚ and restauranteurs‚ whinges about a lousy season‚. Where do all those hordes arriving from new low-cost destinations sleep? On the beach?"
Edward Bradfield, Antibes

As a matter of fact, a surprising number do. Take a pre-dawn stroll down the Croisette or the Prom’ in August and you’ll see them being herded off by the police to make room for the punters.

More seriously though, visitor numbers are far from good whatever impression you may have had at the airport. Tens of thousands of the visitors you see are in fact package travellers who stay in prepaid mobile homes on some of the largest caravan sites in Europe. They spend little money locally and often stay on sites without venturing further than the nearby beach.

This was the first summer in my memory when I encountered hotels which had closed off floors in high season. It’s also the first year we’ve heard the usually optimistic tourist supremos admit that the figures aren’t at all good at the moment. At a September press conference, the CRT even had to shelve the habitual azurohype and admit that the region must better respond to the new “global tourist market”. As I noted last time, the first effort in that response should be a generally warmer welcome.

In a global air traffic market which has expanded some 18% in the past two years, Nice saw no expansion and even saw passenger figures fall year-on-year at certain periods. This past summer our staffers flew back and forth to the U.K. many times and we were always able to get a flight at the time we wanted with the airline we wanted, often at the last moment. None of us ever flew in a full plane and I flew four times with about 30% load factor – something I’ve never seen previously in high summer. A few years ago you couldn’t get a table for lunch on Cannes’ Quai St Pierre in July. This year you could walk into any of the restaurants without a reservation. There were queues at the sandwich stands but that’s hardly as good for the local economy.

More heartening is the congress and convention market where the region benefits from excellent facilities in Cannes, Nice and Monaco, an international airport and a favourable low season climate. Add to that the competence of Business Tourism Director Henri Céran and we’ve got a winning combination in that sector at least.

By the way, in 33 years on the Riviera I’ve never seen yobbish behaviour remotely approaching that of the drunken rabble in Benidorm or Glyfada. Not even in Antibes. And you can get a very good pizza indeed at Le Rital in Biarritz.

M.M.