French senators have called for action against a trend of adult-only, child-free holiday resorts that they warned are treating children like “troublesome pets”. Socialist senator and former families minister Laurence Rossignol warned: “We can’t organise society by separating children off from ourselves in the same way some establishments don’t take dogs. Children aren’t troublesome pets.” It comes amid a growing debate in France over the rise of child-free tourist accommodation, with Sarah El Haïry, high commissioner for children in the French Government, also sounding the alarm over “the new no kids trend”.
Ms El Haïry, who has launched a Family Choice award as part of the “fight” against adult-only resorts, insisted that such facilities were “not part of [French] culture, not our philosophy and not what we want to see as the norm in our country”. Explaining her motivations for launching the award scheme, she told Parents magazine that it would enable families to celebrate kid-friendly sites by voting for their favourite, as part of a wider effort to “put children back at the heart of public space”.
Enabling the trend to continue would mean “allowing people to say: ‘I don’t like children and I don’t want to see them’,” she added. “And that is not acceptable, because to not like children is to not like humanity itself.”
Mr Rossignol has gone a step further and demanded that banning children from hotels, restaurants and campsites be outlawed in France, reportedly by planning to introduce a Private Member’s Bill.
He suggested that allowing child-free spaces was tantamount to “organising society around people’s intolerance of others” and risked “institutionalising and legitimising intolerance”.
France has seen a spike in child-free resorts in recent years – but is not alone in the phenomenon, with similar facilities long-held facets of tourism to countries including Spain, Mexico, Thailand and Greece.
In fact, despite its recent increase, France has a significantly lower percentage of adult-only resorts than countries like Spain, with such sites estimated to make up just 3 to 5% of overall tourism.
Véronique Siegel, associate professor of the UMIH trade union’s hotel arm, said such resorts were “extremely rare” in France and warned that outlawing them would cause a subset of the tourism market to look elsewhere.
“For people seeking adult destinations, if there are none left in France because we’re told its illegal, would they go to neighbouring European countries or further afield?” she asked The Guardian.
Vincent Lagarde, associate professor of entrepreneurship and business at the University of Limoges, added that officials should try to understand the motivation of adult-only tourists – many of whom he said could be parents themselves looking for a break.
“There is a kind of physical and mental exhaustion in French society right now, a need to switch off from professional and family burdens,” he said. “It’s much more complex than simply not liking children, because my research showed that around one-third or more of these holidaymakers were exhausted parents who needed a break from their family.
“It wasn’t that they didn’t like children, they just needed a pause from the rhythm of the rest of the year. And I also observed teachers, or people who work with children. These aren’t people who don’t like kids, but people who need a bit of time without them.”
