This is part of France's agony. Bereavement is terrible enough, but now historic monoliths like the Eiffel Tower have been closed indefinitely.

Reports coming out of Paris describe a city in lockdown. Closed restaurants, deserted streets, cancelled events, mass gloom.

This is how terrorists win. Their planned attacks are not only designed to kill and wound but to financially cripple as well.

France will endure. The resolve of its citizens has been tested before under foreign occupation, and was shown to be strong, resolute and defiant. The French resistance in World War II is testimony to that.

Nonetheless the massacres in Paris will result in Australian and New Zealand travellers opting for holidays closer to home.

Domestic vacations will thrive for a while. It sounds callous but that is what will happen. One could argue that our wanderlust will drift back towards Europe in time, but this war with extremism and terror appears to be getting worse, and will worsen until it gets better.

In the 1960s and 70s the complex Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the IRA era in Ireland ushered in an age of terror, but this was overcome to an extent by peaceful resolution. The Palestinian question has resurfaced.

With contemporary terrorism there appears to be no peaceful resolution, apart from a political solution in Syria hopefully playing a role as a sideshow for peace.

The contemporary terrorist takes no prisoners, except when it pays to demand a tidy ransom. These people pursue an end game no matter how deadly. They will leave us no option but to fight fire with fire.

The irony is, that domestic tourism in Australia will flourish. We have our own terrorist threat level, but there's no place like home in these troubled times.

It seems brutal to recognise a potential windfall for local tourism out of this dark misery, but that's the fact of the matter, whether we like it or not.

No one can expect to rest and recreate in a place where everyone is on edge, in the face of imminent danger.