Europe needs two hands to clean up and make a good impression

Homo touristicus is naturally a migrant animal that tended, in the past, to follow the same routes each year to return to familiar lands in the South: Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece and other destinations in the Mediterranean. Thanks to them and others like them, the foundations of a veritable tourist industry could be established at these destinations for which the arrival of these visitors guaranteed relative prosperity.

If residents of the North are so attracted to Southern countries, it is because sun, sea and sand can be found there at a reasonable price, due to the difference in standard of living. There is nothing strange about taking advantage of these differences. The relationship is win-win between clients who wish to have a good time at a low price and professionals who want to gain their livelihood from their trade and resources.

But times are changing. What else can we expect as information, transportation and distribution channels all become global? The primary appeal for these new global actors is no longer a good quality/price value, but the most delectable promotion. Clients who zap and are more adventurous than previous generations are ready to change their habits to take advantage of the best deal, and even adopt the behaviour of swarms of locusts that devour everything that lies in their way. The right price has lost all its meaning to the detriment of a permanent sell-out that endangers countries made fragile by the slightest geopolitical, economic or safety crisis.

Europe's former tourist economy now competes with destinations that have joined the Community and are opening up to tourism. Long isolated by the Iron Curtain, these destination had developed installations that were the privilege of the regime on the shores of the Adriatic, the Black Sea, Tyrrhenian and Aegean Seas. This low-cost tourism is affordable to Westerners of all origins who race there, forgetting about their former favourite destinations.

Tourism, which should provide shared riches, can become destructive when it upsets local economies that are ill-prepared for the arrival of new destinations. The future takes shape in the form of a pile of ruins, hotels abandoned by their ruined owners... What will happen when the big tour-operators and online agencies will have completed their tour of emerging countries, when they will have exhausted resources, energies and companies that are under pressure? Lacking any global regulation authority, simple common sense should make it possible to regain a better balance.

Each government plays a role in the responsibility and must avoid loading a ship that is already about to sink and Europe has a collective responsibility, like the one it took on for farmers by financing the necessary transfers to sustain viable cultivations. In the countries involved exaggerated taxations, under the pretext that tourists are good cash cows, and the crippling regulations must make way for support measures to revive the competition between wealth-creating companies. And Europe must push in order to federate tourism companies that have been so exploded that they have become easy prey for price negotiations.

On this vast continent that Europe has become, North-South relations have become more complex because they convey the imbalance that persists between an industrial producer in the North that puts a high price on goods that the more agricultural South cannot produce, having focussed on local resources and natural landscapes as their primary engine for economic growth. And yet it needs two hands to clean up and make a good impression. Stuck between even more aggressive competitors and even heavier loads for an activity that is mostly seasonal, Southern Europe risks leaving the market. The bankruptcy of tourism enterprises is propitious to the development of alternative and collaborative offers as well as a series of tax and social evasions, leaving the classic economic models even more fragile.