Please read the contracts carefully before booking your vacation. This is the main advice of Corinne Jolly, president of Pap.fr, a website specializing in property rentals. Invited this Wednesday by BFM TV, she spoke about the difficult compensation for vacationers whose plans have been disrupted by the forest fires, linked to global warming and its heat spikes, which hit Gironde in particular.
He distinguishes two very different configurations: between the evacuees of the burned camps and the inconvenienced travelers, the remedies are not the same.
Same logic for permanent rentals: you will be required to pay the owner, even if the layout of the premises no longer makes it an ideal vacation spot. The latter will probably not be able to find a tenant in the event of cancellation and will want to be compensated.
There are no set rules regarding insurance
More generally, a concerned traveler will need to review their contract: some are very flexible and may include very advantageous cancellation terms, while others will be very strict.
Nor should we expect compensation linked to a case of force majeure: this situation is rare, according to Corinne Jolly.
The same for the case of natural disaster: everything depends on the contracts and the clauses that they include.
However, the president of Pap.fr invites tourists to be careful, without focusing on climate risk. “We cannot manage everything based on natural disasters, they are unpredictable by nature,” he stresses.
A future impact on the vacation rental market?
The fires should leave some traces on the Gironde real estate market and in the surroundings of the places where the fires occurred. But more in the short term than in the long term, according to the expert. Pap.fr noted drops in vacation rentals in the years after certain floods in the southeast and an effect on real estate purchases. But this effect “is nuanced in the long term if nothing else happens.”
Source: BFM TV
