The Paris Motor Show brought the capital to its peak in the first two weeks of October. In this period, the RevPAR for Paris’s hotels rose 13.8% over last year. This burst of growth began during the press days prior to the event with an occupancy rate at 98.9% and a RevPar up by 25% compared with the same period in 2005. Hotels in the first belt around Paris were expecting this saturation and skillfully took advantage of it by raising their rates, driving the RevPar up by +24% on Wednesday, September 27 and + 33% the next day. In all, these two days saw the key performance indicator for the profession reach a record 150 euros.The Paris Tourist Office estimates that an event held in Paris receives “10 to 30% more participants than if it were held in another city”. This is the result of a variety of factors: the city’s cachet and patrimony that is highly appreciated in other countries, its highly developed and constantly expanding transportation network (the tramway opens this month), the concentrations of major exhibition and congress centers that make it possible to tailor offers to needs and, last but not least, the structure of the hotel supply that is the richest in the world with 150,000 rooms in the Ile-de-France and a wide variety of business packages that include accommodations, meeting rooms and top of the line incentive activities. In theory, Paris has not stopped shining in the hearts of organizers the world around.The first weekend of October, with an OR in the capital surpassing 90%, in no way lessened the euphoria. In fact, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe Lucien Barrière at the Longchamp racecourse helped hotels report a surplus of significant activity for a weekend that was already full. A new record...