Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 4th of July. Not much happening in the UK, so let me talk to you instead

about summer in France and in particular the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Yes, three weeks tomorrow the opening ceremony is going to be taking place.

You'll notice that because well all of the three airports serving the French capital,

that's Charles de Gaulle, Olli and Beauvais in northern France

will be closed along with a swath of airspace, the size of Belgium.

Yet after that, I think Paris is going to feel a bit like a ghost town.

I think visitor numbers are going to be way down

on a normal summer and I'm not just taking a guess on that. I've actually spoken and you may have

heard me referring to this before to Corin Minigo who's directed general of the Paris Region

Tourism Organisation, that's Paris Jietem,

she told me she expects at least three out of ten hotel rooms in the capital to be empty.

That compares with just 9%, so roughly 1 in 11 last year.

There will be loads of spectators, of course, but many of them were you from the Paris region,

or they'll be coming in for the day from cities not too far away in terms of time,

places like Bordeaux, Lille, Ly leon no need to stay overnight for those people

they can just hop on another fast train home and that means that hotel rates i'm delighted to say

are finally coming down it's actually taken a little bit longer than I thought but they are

very much on their way down we are seeing sub one hundred euro rates being charged for

decent low budget hotels in the French capital and that's roughly 85, 90 pounds or less and that's absolutely what

you'd expect to pay at the best of times in Paris in central Paris lower rates in the

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