A French TV report is making the rounds this summer looking at four places in France where tourism has stopped being good for anyone:
- Étretat, where Instagram and YouTube have turned a village of 1,200 people into a photo-op stampede that’s literally eroding the cliffs.
- Nice, where a nightlife economy built around pub crawls has driven longtime residents out of their own apartments over noise.
- Chamonix, where short-term rentals have made it nearly impossible for locals and seasonal workers to find housing, because renting to tourists pays several times more than renting to a neighbor.
- Marseille, where cruise ship traffic gets blamed for a share of several hundred premature deaths a year from air pollution.
Algorythms Aren’t Doing Us Any Favors
None of this is new to anyone who’s paid attention. What struck me watching it is how directly it traces back to a small number of accounts and algorithms deciding, over and over, that the same dozen spots in France are the ones worth showing you. Eighty percent of tourism in France is packed into twenty percent of the country. That’s not an accident. That’s what happens when everyone’s incentive is to point you at whatever gets the most likes, regardless of what it does to the place or the people who actually live there.
I’ve been producing Join Us in France since 2014. In that time, I could have built the show around exactly the kind of content that drives this problem: the trending bar crawl in Nice, the best angle for the Étretat cliffs, whatever TikTok has decided is the “hidden gem” this month. It would probably grow the podcast faster, and it would definitely help me reach a younger audience, which I’d genuinely like to do. I don’t do it. Not because I’m against nightlife or popular places existing, but because that’s not what my show is for, and it’s not what makes me love France.
Genuine France Is Where You Least Expect It
What I do instead is slower and less exciting to describe, but it adds up. I spend most of my time on the podcast talking about the villages, regions, and experiences that don’t already have ten million people trying to get the same photo. I tell listeners when a famous site is worth seeing off-season instead of in July. I talk about the parts of France I’ve actually driven to and checked out myself, including a lot of places nobody’s turning into a trend. My Day Trip with Annie service is built entirely around this: getting people out of the tourist center of a region and into a place that’s not Instagramed every second of the day.
Douce France, Cher Pays de mon Enfance
I think this matters more now than it did in 2014, because the tools that concentrate crowds into the same few places have gotten much more powerful, and the toll on those towns has gotten correspondingly worse. If Join Us in France has a job beyond entertaining people, it’s this one: showing that there’s a version of loving France that doesn’t require piling onto Étretat’s cliffs or Nice’s bar strip. There’s a lot of country left to see, most of it quieter, and often better for it. Join me as we continue exploring every aspect of France!
More episodes about exploring France off the beaten track
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