2023-07-21 22:13:49
Almost a year away from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games, scheduled for July 26, 2024, preparations to receive thousands of tourists and athlete delegations intensified this week in the French capital. Authorities warn visitors against fraud, especially in renting tourist properties.
Paris City Hall works with an estimate of receiving 16 million tourists between the Olympics and the Paralympics, which run until September 8 of next year. Those who prefer to rent an apartment or a house on tourist property rental websites, instead of staying in a hotel, are already making reservations, and some are facing problems with false advertisements.
The big sites in the sector, such as Airbnb, Expedia, Abritel, Tripadvisor or the French PAP, have their advertiser verification policies, but you still need to be alert. The most common fraud is the publication of a copy of an existing ad on a competing site, with a more attractive price. Finding two listings for the same property at different prices should sound like a warning, and this is already happening with 10% of rentals.
A small studio for two in Paris during the 2024 Games is currently costing €300-€500 per night, or upwards of €500 if there are two bedrooms or more. Paris residents are offering their homes for rent to third parties during this period, which is theoretically prohibited without declaring it to the city hall, but it is a way to escape the tax levied by the municipality on properties for tourist use.
In order not to have bad surprises, the police and experts recommend that tourists only rent directly with owners and ask for a copy of the person’s identity document, some proof of ownership – it could be the property tax, which in France is called “impôt foncier”, or a recent receipt of payment for a condominium. Another precaution is never to pay the reservation into a bank account in another country.
Faster transit at airports
ADP, operator of the two largest international airports in Paris – Charles de Gaulle and Orly – is already testing this summer of 2022 new equipment and part of the security and hospitality scheme for the Olympics.
At Orly, for example, the police now speak English. One hundred agents were hired to speed up passport control. For next year, the operator has purchased new 3D scanners that will dispense passengers from taking liquids and computers out of their luggage; everything will go straight through the conveyor belt. There will be automatic passport control posts for documents from other countries, at both airports, like the ones that already exist in Brazil just for Brazilians and in Europe just for Europeans. All this is already in the testing phase and will be expanded.
To leave the airports by taxi, app driver or public transport, improvements are still being discussed and this is one of the most complex points of the organization.
Waiting lines for taxis at airports during high season can be up to an hour; apps work a little better. The extension of the metro that runs from the center of Paris to Orly airport (line 14), for example, will only be ready for the closing of the Games, not for the opening, as initially planned.
The organizers promise to increase the frequency of subway trains, reducing the passage intervals on the lines that will serve the competition venues. The regional administration intends to open new bus lines.
For athletes, an exclusive lane is already planned for circulation on the peripheral ring road of Paris and on major arteries in the city. However, taxi drivers are complaining that the traffic will get even more hellish, because the prefecture has already considerably reduced the lanes for cars.
ecological works
The French Olympic Committee and the City of Paris want to hold the most “sober” and “ecological” games in history. Within Paris, there is only one new arena being built, to the north of the capital, in the La Chapelle neighborhood – Arena Adidas –, which will host badminton and gymnastics competitions. In this 8,000-seat stadium, a room was specially designed to make the experience more pleasant for autistic people.
The neighborhood of La Chapelle was chosen because it is the densest, most chaotic, polluted and poorest in the capital; this is where the Cracolândia of Paris is located. The objective of the organizers was to attract investments to generate a transformation in this area.
The rest of the sports facilities within the capital already existed and are just being modernized, with the vegetation of roofs and renovations to make the structures more economical in terms of energy consumption.
What is new and will later become housing and office buildings are the buildings of the Olympic Village, distributed in three suburbs on the northern outskirts of Paris – Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine and L’Île-Saint-Denis. The Brazilian delegation will be installed in Saint-Ouen. This is the poorest triangle in France, the region with the highest concentration of young and low-skilled population. The Olympic project was built with the spirit of inclusion, of promoting social rescue in this area, inhabited mainly by immigrants and their descendants.
The new buildings that will house the 14,500 athletes and their delegations at the Games, in addition to the 9,000 Paralympic athletes, were designed for the climate that will prevail in the region in 2050. The big controversy is that the facilities at the Olympic Village do not have air conditioning. With temperatures soaring in the summer, there is a big debate as to whether athletes will be harmed by the heat.
The chief engineer of the works, from the company Solideo, guarantees that inside the buildings there will be a cooling system capable of keeping the temperature six degrees below the outside temperature. But what if it’s 40 degrees?
This question stirs up diplomatic backrooms. The concern is that this air-conditioning factor could create inequality between competitors. Wealthier delegations will try to install portable air conditioners; some say that there is no electrical infrastructure for the consumption of these appliances. Anyway, this is a big question mark at this time when temperatures break all historical records in Europe, and in the world.
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