Summer in Cannes : thanks to little Euro

Hotel-keepers, restaurant owners, taxi drivers, beach managers and others professional people in tourism sector are fine : the summer months 2000, thanks to a profitable exchange rate, have been exceptional. But…

No surprise in the results of the summer period in Cannes which were established on Tuesday, Sept.5th during the SEMEC breakfast chaired by Gilles Cima, tourism assistant: summer 2000 will have been good. An exceptional period which was confirmed by Didier Benoît (President of the hotel-keepers union), Daniel Alessio (President of UPRL, restaurant owners union), and by taxis, helicopters, beaches…representatives.A record difficult to beat in the futureSome slight differences, however. June was astonishing. July, only good, because of a slight decrease of tourists from July 15th , perhaps because of bad weather. But August was not less than exceptional. Here are some figures: nearly 100% of filling in hotels, cruise passengers were 70,000 last year and will be 110,000 this year (the last cruises will take place in November), the air traffic in Cannes-Mandelieu has increased by 20% in July and 5% in August in comparison with July and August 1999. All the other parameters were as good as the previous ones.In luxury hotels, the number of American and Middle-East clients increased a lot (more than 1,000 rooms of the category for Cannes), a progression of British clientele could be seen, and Scandinavian people came numerous on the Riviera. Will next year be even better on the French Riviera than 2000? According to Robert Vanhauter, director of the Banque de France in Cannes, professional people in tourism sector must give to the town a strategic positioning.And, even if the summer 2000 will not become the summer of the century, the record could, without any problem, hold 10 or 15 years. A simple reason: Cannes, as all the French Riviera has benefited from a very profitable euro-dollar exchange rate. And the arrival of the US economy on the Riviera, may bring exchange conditions more normal with a less weak Euro. And this could provoke a lost of the American clientele.