Tourists flock to France

As Parisians crowd to the beaches in August, tourists are descending on the City of Light in droves, undeterred by a recent survey highlighting complaints that visitors get the cold shoulder from locals.

The most visited country in the world, France received 76 million tourists last year, with Asians making up a growing proportion of those who came from non-European countries and 50,000 visitors jetting over every month from China alone.

All this despite stereotyped images of rude waiters, bored shop assistants and impatient Parisians all too ready to give nervous tourists the brush off in rapid French.

"French hospitality doesn't always have a good reputation," says tour guide Dalanda Diallo, leading a group on a "bateau mouche" tourist boat on the river Seine in Paris.

"We get some feedback from tourists who have visited us before, and in general they tell us that the French are cold and not very welcoming and sometimes it is true," she said.

"But it is a generalisation. There are also French people who are very welcoming." France has always been a tourist magnet its capital Paris is considered one of the world's most beautiful cities and its varied countryside and cuisine are bywords for good living and the finer things in life. The only sticking point has long been the way tourists see the French themselves.

The latest research by the pollsters IPSOS shows that the one thing most visitors complain about is that they are not made to feel welcome.

"They're good but they're very reserved," said Brian Peters, a 40 year-old dentist visiting from Santa Barbara in California.

"It takes a while to warm up to them." Alarmed by the findings, the government commissioned a special report to try to make improvements.

"Our competitors are benefiting from the bad reputation of our welcome," the report said, noting that France risked slipping behind countries like Britain or Italy.

As well as smartening up Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport and improving training for tourism professionals, the report recommended encouraging ordinary French people to improve their welcome of foreign visitors.

"A taste for service which is not servile, a sense of a team effort necessary for the international success of France Ltd, have to be revived," it said.

Things have already started to change, according to some who have been irked by the French in the past.

"I came here four years ago and I had a bad experience with people, but this time I had a very good experience," said Erika de Maduro, from Venezuela. "People were kind and amiable."

And others have never faced any problems.

"I have come to this airport five or six times, but I never felt bad hospitality from the French people," Hajime Kobata, 31, from Japan, said at the Charles de Gaulle airport.

Philippe Kaspi, a senior official at the Tourism Ministry, says France's reputation for unfriendliness is unjustified but he concedes that there is always room for improvement.

"Since France is the first (destination) in the world, it's normal that you would look at what the number one is doing, rather than what the number 150 is doing," he commented.

(Reuters)