If you walk down Rue Charlot in Paris at lunchtime, you will likely encounter a line stretching along the narrow sidewalks. Spanish, American or Korean tourists wait, sometimes for an hour, for their ultimate reward: a sandwich. Or rather "the best sandwich in Paris," as it has been dubbed by visitors in photos or videos amassing millions of views on TikTok or Instagram. On social media, Chez Alain Miam Miam is a phenomenon that has far surpassed the owner, Alain Roussel, a 70-year-old former psychotherapist. He stated upfront: He had "no strategy" for communication. "I never spent a single cent on it." He used social media very little and has no community manager: Tourists did all the work for him. He opened in 2005, at the edge of the picturesque covered market of Les Enfants Rouges. But it was after the Covid-19 pandemic that his stall saw an explosion, with images of his sandwiches, oozing with melted cheese, multiplying on social media. These days, he sells between 400 and 500 a day, at €13 each.

And it's not always a pleasant experience. Overwhelmed with customers, he made recruitment mistakes, faced multiple problems with suppliers and frustrated many tourists when he closed shop. His business went through two turbulent years. Relations with the neighborhood, in this quiet Marais district, are "complicated," he admitted. Shops are annoyed by the congestion in front of their windows. Among Chez Alain Miam Miam's employees, one is responsible for managing the queue only.

Extraordinary rebound

This is tourism in 2025, with its instant fame amplified by buzz, its cult of the good deal, its checklists and its shared photos. In short, tourism in the age of social media, for better or for worse. In the span of four years, travel-related content has exploded on these platforms: Up 410% since 2021 on TikTok, according to Anaïs Devaux, head of this sector at TikTok France. On Instagram, nearly two million travel-related posts were made in 2024, according to calculations by the agency We Are Social. These social networks have become the new tourist guides and have certainly been one of the drivers of the extraordinary rebound the travel sector has experienced since 2022.

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