Where in France is everyone going this year?

I’ve just been looking at the statistics for France This Way to try and predict where everyone is planning to go for their trip to France this year, so owners of hotels and holiday rentals across the land can either get busy preparing, give up now and choose a different career…or move to a more popular region!

So without further ado, here are the official ‘France This Way knows what you’re up to’ statistics (there is a brief explanation of how I came up with the figures at the bottom of the page):

Popular regions of France in descending order, 2012

• Provence total 20% (includes  Luberon 1.6% and Cote d’Azur 6.8%)
• Aquitaine total 8.4% (includes Dordogne 4.1%)
• Loire Valley 7.1%
• Normandy 6.8%
• Rhone Alpes 6.8%
• Paris 6.1%
• Alsace 5.4%
• Brittany 5.4%
• Languedoc 4.3%
• Burgundy 4.1%
• Corsica 4.1%
• Champagne-Ardenne 4%
• Franche-Comté 2.9%
• Midi-Pyrenees 2.9%
• Western Loire (including Vendee) 2.9%
• Poitou-Charentes 2.7%
• Auvergne 2.6%
• Picardy 1.9%
• Limousin 1.6%

For most regions these numbers are roughly in line with the same period in 2011, with just three regions showing a change of more than 10%: Brittany is DOWN about 13% in predicted visitors compared with last year, Limousin is DOWN about 15%, while Rhone-Alpes are UP about 21%.

I’m a bit surprised Brittany is lower than Normandy, and quite surprised how high the Rhone-Alps scores, but otherwise perhaps the numbers are broadly as you’d expect.

What to make of these visitor figures – and where did they come from?

I’m thinking that the numbers for Paris and perhaps Corsica are understated because people already know if they want to go to one of them – that is, visitors don’t generally think ‘where would it be nice to visit in France’ and then choose Paris, they already know they want to go to Paris, and these people wouldn’t show up in these results.

To avoid confusion and errors caused by search engines (it’s no use me saying everyone is going to Picardy if that’s just because I happen to rate higher in google for Picardy than, say, Brittany) I have only looked at which region site visitors look at after visiting our main ‘which region of France to visit‘ page. The page has had about 100,000 visitors over the last couple of months, so a reasonable sample size.

Anything wrong with the above that you can see? Or reasons why your own favourite region should be getting more visitors?