Forget the image of the stereotypical American tourist, it’s apparently the French that piss people off the most:
PARIS (Reuters Life!) – French tourists are the worst in the world, coming across as bad at foreign languages, tight-fisted and arrogant, according to a survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world.
They finish in last place in the survey carried out for internet travel agency Expedia by polling company TNS Infratest, which said French holidaymakers don’t speak local languages and are seen as impolite.
“It’s mainly the fact that they speak little or no English when they’re abroad, and they don’t speak much of the local language,” Expedia Marketing Director Timothee de Roux told radio station France Info.
“The French don’t go abroad very much. We’re lucky enough to have a country which is magnificent in terms of its landscape and culture,” he said, adding that 90 per cent of French people did their traveling at home.
“So when they’re on holiday they can be a bit stressed, they’re not used to things, and this can lead them to be demanding in a way which could be seen as a certain arrogance.”
French tourists are also accused of generally spending less than other nationalities when abroad
Rude, arrogant, and cheap.
Yea, that’s France.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
When I visited far-off countries such as Kenya and Sri Lanka, as part of my naval duties, I always found friendship and a welcoming environment offered to me by the French diplomats and military officials. I will always treasure the warm and genuine friendships formed with French nationals during my travels and during military deployments.
We may not always agree with the French government, but neither do most Frenchmen. The stereotype of the rude French (more accurately, the rude Parisian) is no more true than the stereotype of the rude New Yorker.
BTW, with something like sixty days of holiday per year, a large segment of the French population is both well traveled and multilingual; much more so than we Americans are, on average.
When conversing with the typical Frenchman, keep in mind that they, like their U.S. counterparts, only know what they see on TV, so cut them some slack for not knowing every nuance about our domestic issues and forgive them for thinking our government is nuts, because that is what their television has told them.