‘Children aren’t troublesome pets’: Ban calls intensify against child-free hotels and resorts in France

A French senator has said that child-free resorts and adult-only hotels are discriminatory and risk creating a society of intolerance and called for a ban on them amid a debate in France on whether it is inhumane to exclude children from holidays. “We can’t organise society by separating children off from ourselves in the same way some establishments don’t take dogs,” said Socialist senator and former French families minister Laurence Rossignol. “Children aren’t troublesome pets.”

Last month, the French government’s high commissioner for childhood, Sarah El Haïry, launched a Family Choice award as part of what she called a “fight against the new no kids trend”. El Haïry warned that adult-only holiday resorts were “not part of [French] culture, not our philosophy, and not what we want to see as the norm in our country,” said a report in the Guardian.

She also urged French parents to vote for their favourite child-friendly locations as a way to “put children back at the heart of public space” and stand up to the adults-only sector. “No way can we let it take hold in our society that children aren’t welcome on a restaurant terrace,” she told Parents magazine.

Senator Rossignol calls for parliamentary debate

But Senator Laurence Rossignol went a step ahead and called for a parliamentary debate on her proposal to make it illegal to ban children from venues in France. Rossignol said child-free spaces amounted to “organising society around people’s intolerance of others” and served to “institutionalise and legitimise intolerance”.

“These resorts allow people to say: ‘I don’t like children and I don’t want to see them.’ And that is not acceptable, because to not like children is to not like humanity itself,” Rossignol added.

Child-free resorts and hotels are advertised with images of relaxed adults on sun-loungers undisturbed by kids and have increased across the world in last few years. Businesses say the demand has gone up since the Covid lockdowns.

Hotels reserved for adults have been popular for decades in Mexico and Central America, Thailand and Greece and mostly draw tourists from Germany and Britain.

However, France, which is family-focused and has one of the highest birthrates in Europe, has prided itself on its family-friendly holiday attractions, from towering hotel waterslides to campsites with kids’ clubs.

As the French birthrate has been on decline and President Emmanuel Macron called for a “demographic rearmament” of pro-child policies, there is renewed debate over children’s shrinking place in society.

‘Let kids have their right to be noisy’

A report on reducing French children’s screen-time said kids must be given more alternatives to phones and take up their “rightful place” in society, including “their right to be noisy”.

Véronique Siegel, the president of the hotel section of the UMIH trade union, however, claimed that child-free hotels were “extremely rare” in France and said there was a targeted market and hotels were simply meeting clients’ demands.

“For people seeking adult destinations, if there are none left in France because we’re told it’s illegal, would they go to neighbouring European countries, or further afield,” she asked.

Vincent Lagarde, an associate professor of entrepreneurship and business at the University of Limoges, said, “There is a kind of physical and mental exhaustion in French society right now, a need to switch off from professional and family burdens. It’s much more complex than simply not liking children.”

Lagarde further said that there was a “perception of luxury” associated with adults-only locations, and they could charge higher prices simply because there were no children making noise.

He said the sector was likely to continue to grow steadily in France, in the same way that child-free weddings had increased.