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A campaign has been unveiled to lure back tourists to Paris after a sharp fall in revenue in the wake of November’s terror attacks.
The promotion will particularly target Japanese and Italians, the nationalities most affected by the security scare.
Some hotels in the French capital have halved their prices from €100 to €50 a night in the Montmartre area in an effort to win back business.
A 22% drop in the number of tourists visiting the Paris region in December was revealed last week, compared with the same month in 2014.
The impact of the co-ordinated Islamist attacks that killed 130 people on November 13 ruined projected growth figures for Paris.
A total of 15.6 million non-French people visited the region last year, generating €21 billion. The figure for 2014 was 15.7 million and would have been surpassed without the attacks, according to officials.
A study by the Paris Region Tourist Committee showed vast discrepancies in national reactions to Paris’s year of terror, which began on January 7, 2015, with the death of 12 people in an attack on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Hotels registered a 22.8% fall in Japanese visitors last year, compared with 2014.
There were falls of 17.3% in the number of Italian tourists, of 9.6% in the number of Dutch and of 7.9% in the number of Germans.
Britons, who represent the second-biggest group of non-French tourists in Paris, behind Americans, were less affected, with a fall of only 3.5% to 2.1 million.
The number of American visitors rose by 5.6% and the number of Chinese by 49.1%.
“Clearly the Chinese are less afraid,” Frédéric Valletoux, chairman of the tourist committee, told The Times. “We have to take initiatives and to explain to those who are afraid that Paris is a safe destination.”
The most iconic attractions in Paris were hit by fears that they could be terror targets. The Louvre registered a 4.8% fall in visitors last year, the Eiffel Tower a 2.6% drop and the Orsay museum a 1.2% decline.