Slow travel: the French blind spot.

For way too long, traveling meant: do it all. Fit as much as possible into as few hours as possible. Tick all the “must-sees”.

But the next big shift in tourism won’t be tech. It will be slow.

And that’s not just my take; that’s research.

Dickinson & Lumsdon (2010) describe slow travel as:

“taking time to enjoy the journey, to engage with people and to share a journey/destination and to explore destinations in a less superficial way”.

Meng & Choi (2016) show that what makes these trips powerful isn’t the distance… it’s the felt authenticity.

Mass tourism = quantity.
Slow travel = intensity.

Even though books have been written on this for over a decade, France never really explored what this mode of consuming travel looks like in practice.

Slow travel isn’t some boho vibe. It’s a French blind spot.

We have the landscapes. We have the paths. We have the craft. We have the producers. We have the most well-known “art de vivre” on earth.

And yet: in France, no one connects it all.

A 2025 paper in Management & Avenir (Pupion & Sahut, 2025) shows that French regions invest in “soft mobility” (bike paths, hiking trails)… but not in human coordination.

“There is substantial investment in ‘soft mobility’ paths yet a conspicuous absence of investment in the core competency of coordinating local actors.” (Pupion & Sahut, 2025)

We lack glue. We lack curated meetings. We lack the bridge between people and place.

Slow travel doesn’t need more bike lanes. It needs structures that create relationship. Slow travel is not “packing slowly”, not anti-tech, this is:

move slower, feel deeper
meet locals
be surprised by a detour

Slow travel is stopping the idea that the world is something to consume. It’s bringing curiosity back to the starting point.

Pirouette, les plus beaux détours.

This is why I created Pirouette. Not to “invent” anything. But to fix something obvious and French: travel is more beautiful when it takes its time.

Because the strongest memories are never on the list. They’re in what wasn’t planned.

They’re in the detours.