TNO, “African Violence Chases Away Paris Tourists”, 19 Jan 2017:
Criminal violence perpetrated by massed gangs of African invaders in Paris and Marseilles is driving foreign tourists away from France, with the number of Chinese tourists dropping by over half a million in one year, it has emerged.
According to a report in the French newspaper Le Parisien, the President of the Chinese Association of Travel Agencies in France, Jean-François Zhou, said that 2016 had been a “very bad year” for tourists from his country in France.
Zhou, who is also general manager of a travel agency and official representative of the Chinese tourist association Utour in France, said that “the scourge of criminality is especially aimed at Chinese tourists.”
“They are robbed at the palace of Versailles, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in front of their hotels, on the steps of buses . . . during high season, there is not a day that goes by without tourists being assaulted,” Zhou continued.
“I saw an 80-year-old man seriously injured because he was trying to resist the thieves. Women are pushed over, and as they fall, their bags are stolen.”
Zhou said the level of crime had created a “panic on Chinese social networks,” and that these reports had started to deter Chinese tourists since last year.
He explained that in 2016, about 1.6 million Chinese tourists came to Paris. This was a huge drop compared to 2015, when 2.2 million visited.
It is not only the Chinese who have stopped coming, but also the Japanese and Koreans, he added, pointing out that tourism from Japan had dropped 39 percent, and from Korea by 27 percent.
