“This is such an exceptional event that you cannot necessarily look at temp housing extension and say that this is purely due to personal choices.

The budgets are so skewed because of the market, you have to look at things with a slightly different eye.

Use our advice, really your assignees are probably doing the best they can with the support of the partners you have, but the market is very, very challenging.

Brian touched a little bit on this and moving services.  There are going to be certain periods where your assignee will not be able to get their shipments delivered to their houses if they are living in central Paris. This is also going to be applicable for rental furniture.  Fortunately, there is not going to be this workaround, people are going to potentially need temporary housing outside of the site.

There are increased travel prices and delays.  Heavy traffic and limited car access near event sites.

I have an assignee in Paris who was telling me that she applied 3 weeks ago for her QR code to be able to go from her home to the office and she hasn’t gotten it yet!  We are hoping she’s going to get it.  But just as an example, she said to me “quite honestly, she can already see now that this is going to be quite a challenging summer.”

I think a lot of people who are residents will potentially be going away for their July holiday as opposed to their normal August holiday this year.  I know that Jeremy knows that very well with the August vacations.

There is also a lot of information out there, not only support from myself and the team here but there is also a lot of governmental information which we are going to share with you in a minute”

“So, Paris has been segregated into three zones as it relates to the Olympics.

If you see in the gray area, those are the event sites on the map. And the Blue line surrounding the Gray area is called the Silt Zone, and that is the domestic security and counterterrorism zone. There’ll be no traffic allowed in and around that zone, the Red Zone.

Now the government is advising that in the Red Zone it will allow access to cycles, pedestrians, vehicles that have a pass from the Paris police. The current advice we’re receiving is that movers can apply for a permit for only essential moves.

Now, we have not been given any direction on what constitutes an essential move and the feedback that I am receiving from our moving partners in and around Paris is expected the red zone to be completely restricted to moving.

It’s going to be extremely difficult to verify that you have an essential move and, in all likelihood, it’s going to be virtually impossible to for any movement within the Red Zone.

Now Blue Zone is technically available for removal services. The movers must register in advance to get QR code, and as Jenny had alluded to earlier, getting the QR code could be a little bit of a challenge, but without the QR code, the movers would not be allowed to enter that zone.

I think we need to keep in mind and setting expectations that the situation there is fluid, and we don’t know how smoothly or not the whole situation that’s going to run.

As it relates to the potential for moving services, certainly if there’s any security concerns or issues that arise, the government can shut down all the zones completely to any kind of commercial traffic.

That said, I think the best course of action as it relates to moving household goods into or out of any of those zones, the best course of action is probably to try and schedule that outside of the time frame of the levels.”