Between the Olympics, elections and gloomy weather, tourism slows down

While hotel bookings have finally taken off for the Olympic Games period in Paris, the event is deterring some foreign tourists from visiting the capital, as Air France-KLM warned last week, citing "significant avoidance behavior" in Paris. Galeries Lafayette, for its part, anticipates a "loss of business of the order of 5 to 10% over the two summer months" due to traffic complications, warned the group's managing director Nicolas Houzé in mid-June.