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Paris hangs onto ‘world’s best tourist destination’ title

A report ranking the world's best tourist destinations placed Paris in first place for the second year in a row.

Paris hangs onto 'world's best tourist destination' title
People walking down a street with the Eiffel Tower illuminated in the background in Paris. (Photo by Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP)

Euromonitor, a British company specialising in market research and consumer trends, ranked Paris in first place in its yearly report on ‘best tourist destinations in the world’. 

The study took into account 55 different elements revolving around themes of economic and commercial performance, tourist infrastructure, policies aimed at developing the tourism sector, health and security, as well as sustainability.

Behind Paris, Dubai took second place, Madrid took third, Tokyo was fourth, and Amsterdam came in fifth.

New York and London were further down on the ranking, in 8th and 10th place respectively.

According to Euromonitor, the French capital maintained a “balanced performance between domestic and international tourism”, noting that the city was expected to record more than 15 million international visits in 2023.

The report also added that in 2024, “the Olympic Games will boost international arrivals in Paris.”

In 2022, Paris ranked in first place, again one step ahead of Dubai, the largest city in the UAE which is actually expected to have welcomed more global visitors (16 million) than Paris in 2023. 

READ MORE: ‘Avoid the Eiffel Tower’ – What to see if you’re visiting Paris for just one day

Why do people love visiting Paris?

From museums to beautiful river views and tasty restaurants, there are plenty of reasons people love visiting Paris (including fresh bread on almost every corner).

However, a research by France’s national cinema body recently found that four out of every of five foreign tourists to Paris got an urge to visit after seeing a movie or TV series filmed in the capital.

For one out of 10, it was their main reason for coming, and in half of those cases it was the Netflix series Emily in Paris (38 percent) and Lupin (11 percent) that spurred the trip.

Based on other metrics, including the increased city revenue from the tourist tax, Paris also saw a rise in visits in 2023 – although across the world tourism was badly disrupted in 2020, 2021 and 2022 by the pandemic.

In 2023, AirBnB paid the city of Paris €31.7 million, compared to €24.3 million in 2022 and €9.4 million in 2021. 

“Paris is regaining its attractiveness, which had been somewhat lost since Covid,” Clément Eulry, the new general director of Airbnb in France, told Le Parisien

“The Rugby World Cup also accelerated this trend,” Eulry told the French daily. 

During a press conference over the summer, Paris’ deputy mayor in charge of tourism, Frédéric Hocquard, announced that there had been a 27.2 percent increase in the number people who visited the greater Paris area from January to April 2023 when compared with the same period in 2022.

Overall, local authorities said that French tourism had returned to pre-pandemic levels, but Paris had been lagged behind, in part because a lot of its tourists have traditionally come from the US, China and Japan, which were among the last countries in the world to lift Covid-related travel restrictions.

In the first half of 2023, the largest bloc of foreign tourists came from the United States, at 13 percent, which was followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Brazil.

Overall, the French tourist industry accounts for 9.7 percent of the country’s GDP, but the majority of that comes from domestic tourists – international tourism accounts for just 30 percent of that figure.

What makes Paris the world’s best tourist destination? Share with us your recommendations for the City of Light in the comments below (or tell us which French destination you think beats Paris). 

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COST OF LIVING

What is considered a good salary in Paris?

The higher-paying jobs are heavily concentrated in the French capital, but set against that is the high cost of living - especially the cost of renting or buying a home. So what is considered a 'high-earner' in Paris?

What is considered a good salary in Paris?

Centrist Renaissance candidate Sylvain Maillard, running for re-election in France’s snap parliamentary elections, was trying to highlight the high cost of living in the capital in a debate on RMC Radio 

“You have extremely expensive rents [in Paris], between €1,500 and €1,700, and then there are all the charges and taxes to pay,” he said.

But what most people seized on was his comment that anyone earning €4,000 a month after tax would not be considered rich in Paris – he predictably was accused of being out of touch with French people’s lives.

There’s no doubt that €4,000 a month is good salary that most people would be happy with – but how much do you need to earn to be considered ‘rich’ in Paris?

National averages

Earlier this year, the independent Observatoire des Inégalités calculated poverty and wealth levels in France.

READ ALSO How much money do you need to be considered rich in France?

According to its calculations, to be considered ‘rich’ in France, a single person with no dependants needs to earn more than €3,860 per month, after taxes and social charges. Around eight percent of single workers have this sum deposited into their bank balance every month, it said.

A total of 23 percent of workers take home €3,000 or more every month, while the top 10 percent clear €4,170. 

To be in the top one percent of earners in France in 2024, one person must bring in at least €10,000 per month. After taxes and social charges.

The median income – the median is the ‘middle value’ of a range of totals – of tax households in mainland France is €1,923 per month after taxes and social charges, according to INSEE 2021 data, which means that a ‘rich’ person earns about twice as much as a person on the median income, according to the Observatoire.

Paris situation

About 75 percent of people living in Paris earn less than €4,458 per month, according to Insee data – so according to those calculations, 25 percent of Parisians earn the equivalent of the top 10 percent in France. 

But that city-wide average still hides a wide degree of variation. In the sixth arrondissement, the median income is €4,358 per month, after tax. In the seventh, it’s €4,255.  Further out, those bringing home €4,600 a month in the 19th and 20th arrondissements are among the top 10 percent in wealth terms.

But still, the median income in Paris is €2,639, significantly higher than the €1,923 France-wide median.

That would mean – using the Observatoire des Inégalités’ starting point for wealth – that a Paris resident, living on their own, would have to bring home €5,278 per month to be considered ‘rich’. 

France is a heavily centralised country, with many of the highest-paying industries concentrated within the capital, meaning there is much more opportunity to secure a high-wage job if you live in Paris.

Cost of living

Even these figures should all be taken with a pinch of salt because of the relatively high cost of living in the capital, compared to elsewhere in France. Paris is objectively an expensive place to call home.

In 2023, France Stratégie published a report on the disposable income of French households, after housing, food and transport costs were deducted. It found that, on average, people living in the Paris region had more left to spend, due to higher incomes and despite the fact that housing costs more.

It’s the income paradox in action. A person with a take-home salary of €4,000 per month has more money to spend if they live and work outside Paris. But they’re much more likely to earn that much if they live and work in Paris, where it’s not as valuable. 

Someone who earns a ‘rich-level’ salary in Paris might not appear rich – because they live in an expensive area, and a surrounded by very wealthy people in property that’s out of reach all-but the fattest of wallets. But they’re still earning more than twice the median income in France.

And that’s what Sylvain Maillard was getting at, clumsily as he may have expressed it.

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