EURO 2016 TO BRING 1 BILLION EUROS FOR FRENCH TOURISM

With the EURO 2016 expected to kick off next year (10 June - 10 July, 2016) in France, the football championship is expected to bring in approximately one billion Euros to the French tourism.

According to Jaques Lambert, the President of the EURO 2016, the competition that is the fifteenth from its inception, has gained popularity amongst football fans. Actually, before an annunciation of the teams that will take part in the European Championship, between June 10th and July 10th, 2015 the first one million tickets were snapped away quickly for eleven million requests. The next sale of 800,000 tickets is scheduled for December, this year.

The evident craze for the event is proving that Atout France's ambition of an approximate 2.5 million supporters attending the event and spending a minimum of one billion Euros will come to pass. The EURO 2016 signed a partnership convention with Atout France on the 17th of July, 2015. Therefore, the French agency expects to arrange professional tourism and promotional awareness about the event.

The EURO 2016 Championship will be the third event of its kind to be hosted by France. The first time it was in 1960 when it was won by the USSR and the second time in 1984 when France won.

The Championship presents an amazing opportunity through which France can market itself to world. Apart from the numerous people that will be watching the games from homes and hotels, the number of live spectators is also expected to be tremendous. Initially, the agency Atout France had counted on 60 percent of the supporters to be French nationals. The organization is now reconsidering the estimates to 50-50.

In total, the number of foreigners from close to 180 countries is expected to be at least 1.5 million. Out of the requests done so far, the English and German neighbors account for 30 percent of them. Summing them up with 1 million locals, the 2.5 million supporters are expected to spend at least one billion Euros.

Retransmission of each game is also expected to raise the number of viewers to 150 million. Actually, this estimate is still low since in 2012, the EURO 2012 in Ukraine and Poland amassed 8.1 billion viewers. That increased hotel rates substantially.

The games will be hosted in Ten French Cities namely; Lens, Saint-tienne, Bordeaux, Nice, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Paris et Saint-Denis, and Toulouse. Therefore, the enormous communication campaign is expected to greatly benefit these cities. For the supporters that will attend the event, accommodation arrangements have been well sorted. The DMC branch of Kuoni Suisse has been selected as the official agency with the number of overnight stays expected to be close to 250,000.

France is expected to spend close to 1.6 billion Euros in the renovation of ten stadiums. That is quite a deal considering the great benefits that will come with hosting the event.