#3 Law NOTRe or how to paralyze tourism governance

Today I decided to be crazy, crazy, a real swinging machine. We could have talked about the phenomenon of transhumance that the A7 motorway will experience in a few days but I don't feel like a journalist for 90 minutes of investigations or Emergency Calls...and in any case I don't have a press card. So today's subject is perhaps the most controversial within the network of Tourist Offices... The N.o.t.r.e law or more particularly the grouping of territories and their Tourist Offices.

THE GENESIS OF A Slightly Fuzzy Law

It was during a dark night of June 18, 2014 that Ms. Marylise Lebranchu, Minister of the Civil Service and Decentralization, and Mr. André Vallini, Secretary of State for Territorial Reform at the time, tabled the bill on the new territorial organization of the Republic in the Senate. The bill in its initial state (before parliamentary debates) is made up of four main parts:

The strengthening of regional responsibilities and the evolution of the regional map

The rationalization of territorial organization

The guarantee of solidarity and territorial equality

Improving financial transparency and accountability of local authorities

From December 16, 2014 to January 27, 2015, the Senate examines the project at first reading before passing it to the National Assembly which adopts the text at first reading on March 10, 2015. But from the written bill, the intercommunal component (articles 14 to 23) is deployed around "the continuation of the movement of grouping of municipalities to have on January 1, 2017 intermunicipalities whose size will correspond to the realities experienced and which will have the necessary means to offer populations the level of service to which they aspire" and the concomitant weakening of community interest for the communities of municipalities leads to the strengthening of skills, which operates in two directions:

- on the one hand, the compulsory skills are supplemented by the transfer of the promotion of tourism and the development, maintenance and management of reception areas for Travelers.

The notion of community interest is restricted to its express mention for certain skills and no longer as a general principle for the exercise of mandatory skills;

- on the other hand, the catalog of optional skills is extended to the creation and management of public service centers.

All these texts are available on the website www.senat.fr and numerous commission opinions have been given but without a single note from the Tourism Commission, which still exists in the Senate, chaired by Jean Jacques Lasserre (incidentally, I found the presence of a study group on horses...)

Ultimately, the law was adopted on August 7, 2015 with, for the Tourism jurisdiction, the following text:

“Art. L. 134-2.-The communities of municipalities and the agglomeration communities exercise ipso jure, in place of the member municipalities, the competence in matters of tourism promotion, including the creation of tourist offices, within the meaning of 2° of I of article L. 5214-16 and 1° of I of article L. 5216-5 of the general code of local authorities.

“On the occasion of the transfer of this competence to the communities of municipalities and to the agglomeration communities, the tourist offices of the tourist municipalities and of the classified tourist resorts are transformed into information offices of the intercommunal tourist office, except when they become the headquarters of this office. The deliberative body of the public establishment of intermunicipal cooperation with its own taxation may however decide, at the latest three months before the transfer of competence comes into force, to maintain separate tourist offices for classified tourist resorts, by defining the terms of pooling the means and resources of the intermunicipal tourist offices existing on its territory. »

and the Tourism Code is thus modified:

Article L. 133-1 is supplemented by a paragraph worded as follows:

“When several protected territorial brands coexist on the territory of the same municipality or the same public establishment of intermunicipal cooperation with their own taxation system, distinct by their location, their name or their mode of management, the municipality is authorized to create a tourist office for each of the sites having a protected territorial brand. »

But what about the definition of protected territorial brand which is still awaiting a response almost two years later.

The Mountain law passed on October 18, 2016 will relax a few points but will not answer the many questions posed by the operational organization of this new law.

BUT IN TERMS OF TOURIST DESTINATIONS?

My first thought was to measure whether the parliamentarians really knew the impact of their text on all the tourist bubbles that make up a country like France. Of course, tourist promotion groups were necessary...but in urban areas, not in all tourist areas. Many special cases were going to arise and numerous associations of elected officials came forward on the subject. Mountain or seaside resorts have also demonstrated their uniqueness with cases such as that of the Belleville valley which in the same territory has the resort of Menuires and Val Thorens. How then can we apply the NOTRe law? Should we abandon years of national but also international promotion work? And when I say years, it is almost simplistic since many areas have a tourist history of more than a century that is imperative to preserve.

Why did you launch a reform of tourism promotion? I still wonder... While no Minister of Tourism has been appointed since 2014, suddenly we say to ourselves "Hey, if we grouped them together, would they be more efficient?". The tourist economy in France represents between 7 and 8% of GDP in 2016, and 80 million foreign tourists (note that the figure takes into account the number of passengers in transit at airports...). This is without counting national tourism, Franco-French stays or simply day trippers who come to a territory.

A few months ago, a community elected official argued in a meeting that the aggregation of tourism expertise was comparable to the Volkswagen group in terms of destination brands. He owns several brands and manages them independently. It's a bit chilling to hear things like that. This amounts to comparing destinations to consumables that can be put on the shelves; he could then also have cited Unilever, Procter & Gamble or Danone at the same time. Not really knowing his subject or simply wishing to mark his presence in a meeting which was far beyond him, reactions like this raise the question of the decision-making capacity of these new governances to manage a fragile industry on which the economic and social character of an entire country often depends. For more than a century, tourism has enabled many people to stay and work in their territory and avoid an urban exodus.

WHAT ABOUT THE FAMOUS TOURIST BRAND?

As for destination marks, it is not just an association of words that can be placed as a simple criterion in a bill without knowing its real meaning. Behind this, there are definitions of competitive advantages, specific areas of activity, key success factors and many other parameters which cannot be generalized during a territory extension or which would have the sole effect of diluting the effect of a targeted promotion and would lead to a loss of attendance. I'm not even talking about the creation of a new umbrella territory brand which would only lose the customer in an ocean of new names without necessarily a promise behind it.

In conclusion, we cannot modify a tourism ecosystem without understanding the consequences in advance. One territory does not necessarily resemble another and its management or promotion can be unique. We cannot, then, standardize it in a large whole whose sole purpose would be to group together the financial values ​​that it generates. Because let's not lie to ourselves, if tourism competence has been integrated into the reform of the territorial organization of the new republic, it is mainly to offer its budgets and revenues for the benefit of the new territorial units which are these communities of new communes.