Simon Hardy: from the field to France By locals, a journey of encounters and transmission

Simon Hardy comes from Brittany, about 25 kilometres from Mont-Saint-Michel — “borderline”, as he puts it himself, between Normandy and Brittany. Before Provence, where he has lived for more than a decade, his path was deeply rooted in western France: Rennes, La Roche-sur-Yon, Tours.

His interest in tourism first came from a very strong bond with nature. He studied environmental management and protection, then took a degree in the ecotourism development of heritage — a course that was only just being created at the time.

Ecotourism became for him the meeting point of three things that already drove him: being outdoors and in the field, protecting nature, and travelling to meet others. He almost sums it up as a triangle: on one side walks, fishing and contact with nature; on another the urge to protect these spaces; and finally travel and human contact. In the middle of that triangle: ecotourism.

He continued down that road with a master's in social geography and a dissertation on two settings where Humankind and Nature meet: Luang Prabang in Laos and the Pendjari park in Benin.

But his taste for travel also comes from much further back. Simon talks in particular about his parents. The family was not especially materialistic and, whenever there was a budget available, it went to holidays: with his brother, he had the chance to travel across France several times a year. Looking back, he understands that this childhood probably laid the first stones of what he would later do: discovering places, stepping off the obvious routes and understanding what makes a place singular.

The first real turning point in his professional life happened in Laos. Simon was in his early twenties when he landed an internship that was particularly hard to get. Jean-Yves, his future supervisor, prepared him for nearly six months.

He briefed me for six months, he really tested and pushed me — that internship was hard to get.

A few days before Christmas, around 23 December, the phone finally rang: the internship was confirmed. But that demanding stance had a purpose. Before sending him into the field, his supervisor wanted to be certain he understood the people he would be working with, the right ways to behave, the do's and don'ts, the cultural differences.

Once Simon arrived in Laos, the relationship changed completely. His supervisor considered him ready. And he trusted him.

He put a motorbike in my hands and I set off due south of Laos along the Annamite Range, on the Ho Chi Minh trail.

His mission was notably to scout and build a trekking itinerary aimed at the Japanese market.

Simon went to the Geographic Institute in Vientiane to collect large paper maps that he carried in his backpack — not really any GPS back then. He still remembers those huge rolls of maps, almost like a scene from a comic book.

The start of the monsoon made the terrain even more particular: sometimes you had to hack your way through the vegetation. And then he discovered a reality he had not been prepared for: unexploded ordnance still present in certain areas after the conflicts in Indochina. Before crossing certain sectors, you sometimes had to wait for deminers to intervene.

I didn't know I was getting into that kind of internship.

But that experience changed his life. Not only for the adventure: what marked him deeply was the trust that an experienced professional had decided to place in him. His supervisor also left him with a sentence he would keep for nearly ten years:

One day it will be your turn to create your own tours, and you'll know where they need to be created.

Simon was in his early twenties. He would keep that idea in mind until the day he actually created his own tours in France.

After that experience, Simon worked for several years in international cooperation. He worked on highly technical projects blending environmental preservation, cultural heritage and the tourism development of territories. And he set an almost systematic condition: there had to be a tourism dimension.

I wouldn't commit to those projects until that was there.

He worked in particular with the Mission Val de Loire, which supports the territory inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List but also has an international cooperation remit. One of the ideas was then to work “from river to river”: the knowledge gained around the Loire could be shared with other territories — the Niger delta, Lake Tanganyika in Burundi, or the Mekong around Luang Prabang in Laos.

In Laos, for example, Simon took part in creating trekking and ecotourism itineraries along a tributary of the Mekong. Tourism already existed, but it was diffuse, poorly organised, sometimes rather brutal for the natural environment. The goal was therefore to better manage human flows and their consequences: visitor numbers, fishing, pressure on habitats, protection of the riparian vegetation — all that greenery on the banks that is essential to the balance of watercourses.

Simon then worked within a very rich institutional and scientific ecosystem: IRD, CIRAD, scientific institutions, embassies, alliances and local authorities. He loved the operational dimension of these subjects. But something was missing.

It was fieldwork, but a lot of it was discussed on paper.

The missions sometimes lasted about ten days: barely enough time, he felt, to understand a country and its atmosphere. He had the feeling of “skimming over” things. Having been “bitten by travel” in South-East Asia, he now wanted to truly live on-site. He resigned from the Mission Val de Loire after four years and became an international solidarity volunteer.

Simon waited nearly ten months before a mission was offered to him. In the meantime, he went to Scotland to brush up his English — while joking that old Scottish pubs may not be the most effective teaching method. Then a call came in: he was offered the chance to go to Ethiopia to work around the castles of Gondar. His first reaction was almost disbelief:

Ethiopia, OK. But castles in Africa — I'd never heard of that.

He took the plane and arrived in Gondar, in the cultural north of Ethiopia. And there, a huge surprise.

Simon discovered the former capital of Abyssinia and its monumental royal complex. He tells with amusement the story of these sovereigns who did not wish to live in the palace of their predecessor: each therefore built his own next door, if possible a little higher, with an even more impressive keep. Over the generations, this gave rise to a genuine royal enclosure made up of palaces and monumental buildings: the Fasil Ghebbi of Gondar, today inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Simon arrived without claiming to be a specialist of that period.

I obviously didn't arrive with an expert's eye, because I knew nothing at all about that period.

His role was that of a decentralised cooperation coordinator, working notably with Vincennes and its expertise in historical heritage. On-site, he worked with the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies, the Alliances Françaises, Europe, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japanese partners and various local and international players.

But the project's goal went well beyond restoring old stones. It was about rehabilitating heritage to make it a lever for local development and poverty reduction through tourism. And, above all, it was not first about attracting foreigners: the priority was domestic tourism. Bringing Ethiopians back to the site.

Because this heritage also holds a painful history: during the Derg period, some places were associated with detention and torture. There was therefore a real challenge of reclaiming these places.

Simon sums up this mission as an almost dizzying blend of disciplines: entrepreneurship, social aid, architecture, history, tourism, project management…

It was wild.

And, above all, this time he lived on-site.

After two years in Ethiopia, his contract came to an end. Simon then felt the time had come to return to France. And the sentence from Jean-Yves, his supervisor in Laos, came back to him: that famous moment when he would “know”.

He decided to settle down. His partner at the time, who had lived with him in Ethiopia, went back to studying; their path led them towards Aix-en-Provence and the South-East. Simon admits that, had he chosen solely according to his personal affinities, he might have gone to the South-West, notably the Basque Country. But he finally settled in Nyons, in the Drôme provençale, and began creating his first tours.

In 2015, he created his company. Ten years later, in 2025, the agency celebrated its tenth anniversary.

A few years after the company was founded, Simon's father passed away. Before his death, Simon felt the need to ask him many questions. He revisited the holidays of his childhood with him, but through the eyes of an adult and a travel professional.

What was his idea of travel? Why did he choose one destination over another? What had he wanted to pass on to his children? What were his limits, his criteria, his desires?

Looking back, Simon believes these conversations nourished the first messages, the first values and even certain slogans of what would become So Provence, So Alps!, then France By locals. The brand was created in 2019 with his partners, in the continuity of Italy by Local.

Behind the project you ultimately find much of what runs through his whole life: places, inhabitants, travel, transmission and the idea of moving away from standardised tourist consumption.

Simon built his team gradually. He claims a certain caution in the way he runs a business.

I'm fairly security-minded.

He never wanted to pay himself too early or to a point that would jeopardise the company's financial balance. He gradually developed production and tours in France. But with no racing logic.

I've never really been in a rush. I don't have the start-up mindset.

He admits this way of doing things may have made him miss certain opportunities. But it also allowed him to last. This philosophy also comes from more experienced professionals he met, who had lived through — over twenty or twenty-five years in tourism — the attacks, the health crises, the geopolitical and economic upheavals. Simon then understood something essential:

We, the artisans of travel, are sponges that soak up our entire environment.

There will always be crises. The challenge is therefore less about trying to predict them all than about building a company robust enough to weather them. Growing “gently”, staying stable, keeping good relationships between partners and being able to take the time to talk before committing: all of that is part of his model.

Simon insists enormously on another element of his journey: people. He feels he has always met, at the right moment, people with ten or twenty more years of experience, able to pass something on to him. His supervisor in Laos is the first example. Others would follow.

Around 2018, he met Gabriele, who was looking for a partner in France. At first, Simon hesitated: his company was his “baby”… How far did he want to open up what he had just built? The encounter with Gabriele and Mandala Organic Tours would nonetheless become extremely important.

It let me give the business a kick in the right direction.

And he adds something particularly powerful:

It's not certain I'd have held on without them for as long as I have.

He also tells, with a lot of humour, the story of their first meeting. Until then they had exchanged only by email: Simon was convinced Gabriele was a woman; Gabriele, for his part, was looking for an older, more experienced man. They met on the Cours Julien in Marseille: one looking for a woman, the other for “an old guy”. They ended up finding each other all the same.