The 2014 touristic season noticed an English sunbeam

En dépit d'un temps plus que maussade, la saison touristique d'Angers et de l'Anjou parait avoir été préservée. Les sites de visites ont enregistré une hausse ou une baisse de fréquentation selon qu'ils sont couverts ou en plein air. Pour 2015, les acteurs d'Angers et d'Anjou veulent affronter ensemble la météo économique. Mais à Angers et en Anjou, le vrai rayon de soleil est venu des touristes... anglais.

The comments of Angers and Anjou professionals of tourism about the summer season are rather satisfactory, in spite of a very adverse meteorology. Sixty per cent of those assess that the activity was at least steady or favourable. If the French tourists were less numerous than predicted, on the contrary the foreign customers were back and above all, those coming from... England. Maybe because of the rainy weather!

That one has mainly taken advantaged the uban sites. With 34,000 visitors, the five Angers museums recorded an increase of the visits by 4%. Unfortunately, the trend is quite different in the Terra Botanica park. For 2014, that one welcomed (until now) 130,000 paying visitors, a figure clearly below those of 2011 (280,000) and 2012 (170,000). while the pivotal point would be at 230,000 charged admissions. The owner of the park, the Maine-et-Loire general council made clear that changes are underway in order to reach the objective of 250,000 paying visitors.

Its president, Christian Gillet, wishes that the Angers city and the Angers Loire Métropole authority be shareholders of Terra Botanica. "They were absolutely absent, what is really a nonsense", he said.  Mr. Gillet wants to see the Anjou tourism operators to implement a communication campaign in Paris and somewhere else. Given the latest figures of the Anjou tourism observers, that one should be directed to English speaking people.

But the Terra Botanica website is only written in French...