Metro tickets will almost double in price during next year's Paris Olympics to help cover the cost of running urban transport with millions more visitors, the regional transport authority has announced.
Single tickets will be sold for €4 compared to €2.10 now, and 10-ticket blocks for €32, compared to €16.90.
The head of the Paris region's transport authority, Valerie Pecresse, said in a video posted on X that annual and monthly travel passes for residents would not be affected by the steep price rises.
"It is out of the question that people living in the Paris region should pay for the extra cost" brought on by the Olympic Games and estimated at 200 million euros, Pecresse said.
Some 10 million visitors are expected during the Olympic and Paralympic Games starting next July, requiring more frequent transport services.
Tourists will, however, be able to buy a special flat-rate pass for €16 per day or €70 per week during the Games for travel around Paris and its region, including to the Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports.
Pecresse advised Paris residents to stock up on metro tickets before July to avoid the surcharge, which will be effective from 20 July to 8 September.
Do you speak metro?
Meanwhile, the Paris metro has launched an instant translation app ahead of the Games to help hapless foreign visitors navigate the French capital's urban transport system.
Tradivia, an instant translation app able to handle 16 languages, with which metro operator RATP has equipped 6,000 of its staff across the network's stations.
The app translates spoken queries, including in English, German, Mandarin, Hindi and Arabic, into French for the benefit of RATP's agents whose responses then get translated back to the language of the visitor.
"We had a real issue here, because our agents can't be expected to answer queries in all languages," said Valerie Gaidot, customer experience head at RATP.
The app has been specifically tailored to the Paris metro experience, and knows its way around station names, itineraries and the various ticket and travel pass types that can leave tourists bewildered.
This, RATP said, is a decisive advantage over general translation help like Google Translate that sometimes fails to make sense of the metro's idiosyncrasies.
After experimenting on three urban lines first, the operator rolled out the service across the network over the summer.
In addition, four languages – English, German, Italian and Spanish – are currently available for special platform announcements, with Mandarin and Arabic to be added before the Olympics.
(with AFP)
