Hotels and resorts that do not accept children have been asked to impose a ban

Child-free resorts and adults-only hotels are discriminatory, risk creating a climate of intolerance in society and should be banned, a French senator has said, amid a growing debate in France about whether it is inhumane to exclude children from holidays.

“We cannot organise society by isolating children from themselves, just as some institutions do not accept dogs,” says Socialist senator and former French family minister Laurence Rossignol. “Children are not pets that cause trouble.”

Last month, the French government's high commissioner for children, Sarah El-Khairy, who has warned that adults-only resorts are "not part of [French] culture, not our philosophy and not something we want to see as the norm in our country", launched the Family Choice Prize as part of "the fight against the new trend of not having children".

El-Khairy called on French parents to vote for their favourite child-friendly places to “put children back at the centre of society” and combat the adults-only sector. “We cannot allow the idea to take hold in our society that children are not welcome on a restaurant terrace,” she said.

But Rossignol said the government must go further, calling for a parliamentary debate on her proposal to make it illegal to ban children from sports grounds in France. Rossignol stressed that child-free areas represent “the organisation of society around people’s intolerance of others” and serve to “institutionalise and legitimise intolerance”. Rossignol said the resorts “allow people to say: ‘I don’t like children and I don’t want to see them’. And that’s unacceptable, because not to love children is to not love humanity itself.”

Child-free resorts and hotels, often advertised with images of relaxed adults on sun loungers undisturbed by screaming children or jumping in the pool, have proliferated around the world in recent years, and companies say demand for them has increased since the Covid lockdowns.

For decades, hotels aimed at adults have been popular in countries such as Mexico and Central America, Thailand and Greece, attracting many tourists from northern Europe, including Germans and Britons. South Korea has also seen a rise in cafes and restaurants that ban children, The Guardian reports.

But France, traditionally family-oriented and boasting one of the highest birth rates in Europe, prides itself instead on its family-friendly attractions, from towering hotel water slides to campsites with kids’ clubs. France has relatively few adults-only hotels and resorts, which account for an estimated 3-5% of total tourism, far less than neighbouring market-leading Spain.

As France’s birth rate declines and President Emmanuel Macron calls for a “demographic retooling” of policies for children, debate is renewing over children’s shrinking place in society. Last year, an expert report on the decline in screen time among French children said children needed to be given more alternatives to phones and their “rightful place” in society, including “their right to make noise.”

Véronique Siegel, president of the hotel section of the UMIH union, said hotels that do not allow children are “extremely rare” in France compared to the total number of tourism businesses. She stressed that there is a target market and hotels are simply meeting customer requests: “As for people looking for places for adults, if there are none left in France because we have been told it is illegal, will they go to neighbouring European countries or even further afield?”

Vincent Lagarde, an associate professor of entrepreneurship and business at the University of Limoges who studies the business model of child-free resorts, said the main reason holidaymakers choose them is not because they hate children, but because they need a holiday.

Lagarde comments: “There is a kind of physical and mental exhaustion in French society right now, a need to take a break from professional and family concerns. It’s much more complex than just a dislike of children, because my research showed that about a third or more of these holidaymakers were exhausted parents who needed a break from their families. It’s not that they don’t like children, they just needed a break from the rhythm of the rest of the year. And I’ve also looked at teachers or people who work with children. These are not people who don’t like children, but people who need a little time away from them.”

Lagarde found that the second reason people choose child-free resorts is because they want to spend time alone or with friends—a 2014 survey in France found that 56% of parents went on holiday without their children. Their children mostly went on romantic mini-breaks. Finally, there’s what Lagarde called the “perception of luxury” associated with adults-only destinations. These hotels could charge higher prices simply because they didn’t have rowdy kids.

Lagarde notes that while French anti-discrimination and trade laws are open to interpretation on the issue, no family in France has ever filed a legal complaint against a hotel for not accepting children.