Be Your Own Travel Agent

The excitement of travel starts before takeoff. Learn enough about your destination to out line where you will stay, and any can't-miss activities for your family. Here's how I did it.

A surprisingly large part of the fun was spending five or six months gearing up to serve as my own travel agent. Tour groups are a less stressful way to take off on an adventure. Your decisions consist of where you want to go, for how long, and how much you want to pay. Someone else figures out the small stuff. When you plan your own trip, you add to those big-picture decisions with tons of detail between landing and taking off again. I have done both types of travel. I went with a tour group to Italy and traveled around Paris without a tour group and its guide. Both were great experiences. The trip to Italy included four relocations to different cities in the country. In that case, a guided tour group was the best for me. I stayed in five different hotels on that trip. Someone else managed all the logistics. For Paris with my daughters, planning our own schedule was best. We customized our itinerary with only the sites we were interested in. We adjusted as we pleased.

The two easiest decisions were the airline and hotel. I used an airline that I fly 98% of the time for SkyMiles rewards. It has the most flight options in and out of my city. I am in two hotel chain loyalty programs and used the one I have been using more in recent travel. Those two decisions were easy; hopefully, I will receive discounts for future travel. The hotel chain I use had five or six options in Paris. I quickly figured out that the most expensive options were nearest the city’s center, and the farther you were from the center, the less it cost. I know some prefer to stay in an Airbnb or with other rental programs for homes, but my trip wasn’t going to be about my experience in my lodging. My goal was to

be out in the city as much as possible. The hotel was strictly for sleep, showering, and storing my clothes.

Now on to planning what we would see. We were gone ten days total, including two and a half days of travel. Seven nights in Paris. That left us six full days to explore, plus dinner the night we arrived. Planning was necessary to buy tickets in advance and avoid spending too much of the trip standing in lines. Most restaurants required dinner reservations, and some wanted them for lunch. Out of all the opportunities, how do you decide which ones to do? I talked to two or three friends who had visited Paris pre-Covid. They shared their insights on what they enjoyed most. I spent hours reading things online. Choosing what to see could have been finalized faster, but the reading and researching were part of the fun for me. I read material from companies offering tickets for tours and read French bloggers (setting the website to English.) The site I came to rely on was the official Paris Tourist Office at https://en.parisinfo.com/. The helpful information provided enough background to pique my interest or confirm that it wasn’t what I wanted. The site was formatted in a way most helpful for the type of questions I had.

After narrowing down the things I was interested in and identifying three or four restaurants that I wanted to visit, I built an itinerary so I could buy museum and other tickets in advance and make restaurant reservations. I planned one big item a day. I made reservations for three restaurants and a dinner cruise. The other meals were unplanned. We left much of the last two days free to visit markets and do anything we heard about while there that we did not want to miss.

I had five must-do activities for the trip. A cruise on the Seine River, the Louvre, Musee Rodin, Giverny, and the Arc de Triomphe. I put each on a day of our week and then looked to see which sites were open on which days. I shuffled as needed, then started finding the other things I wanted to do within walking distance of the first five. I had an informal list of additional activities I hoped to see. For each day, I added one or more of those activities if it was near the neighborhood for the day. My daughters requested the Picasso Museum, and after we spent a day or two in the city, they decided they wanted to go to the Catacombs. Picasso and the Catacombs both wound up on day six. I opted out of the Catacombs. The art market was only open on Sunday, our last day, which made it the perfect lead-in for a day of visiting it and other markets and exploring one more neighborhood.

We focused on a neighborhood each day with few exceptions. The areas we visited were the Eiffel Tower (west end of Paris), the Latin Quarter (south central), the Bastille (east part of the city), Marais and other areas (north central), and Ile de Cite (the island in the Seine with Notre Dame.) It was great that we had time to walk in these neighborhoods and savor those experiences along with the big attractions. Outside of Paris, we took a one-day excursion into the countryside to Giverny, to a rustic setting in the country for a sophisticated restaurant for lunch, and then on to Versailles for the afternoon. Traveling around the rural area outside of Paris broadened our understanding of another lifestyle in France.

Online you can find multiple options for guided tours for any activity in town. We only used two guided tours during the trip, not counting the dinner cruise on the Seine, which we booked through a tour company. I thought of it more as a dinner reservation on a boat.

The guided tour to Giverny and Versailles was worth the cost. I wanted to do both places and only use one day. A half day at each location was enough for us, and each site was unique in its history, beauty, and perspective provided. Five or six companies were offering similar tours. The price differences were related to the mode of travel ranging from a big bus to a private chauffeured limousine. We went with a 7-passenger van option. It gave us the best access to our guide and kept our group small enough that it was easy to move around in the Gardens of Giverny and the Palace of Versailles. The more folks in the group, the less expensive that option was.

We also bought a tour ticket for the Eiffel Tower only because I could not get tickets at our preferred time any other way. Two weeks out was too late to get tickets for the Eiffel Tower. I had left it until last, thinking there wouldn’t be a problem, but I couldn’t get an advance ticket except for 7 a.m. or after 6 p.m. None of us wanted to be anywhere at 7 a.m. I wanted to see the city during the day rather than the lights at night. My solution was to go online to find the cheapest tour group tickets available for mid-morning. It turned out to be for the best anyway. The guide we had was able to point out the landmarks in each of the four directions and provide a brief history. We could have looked without a guide, but it was good to know what to look for and what we were seeing. Otherwise, it would have been just a sea of thousands of buildings.

Tour groups advertise skip-the-line tickets. Those aren’t necessary. They only get you into the short line rather than the long line. The so-called skip-the-line tickets, which come with a guide, are much more expensive than buying your own ticket in advance, as we did. The lines that I remember were at the Louvre and d’Orsay Musee. Both had long lines to buy a ticket and a short line if you already had your ticket. Our wait was around five or ten minutes at both museums. The non-ticket lines were closer to a half-hour to an hour long. We didn’t need a guide in any of the museums. Each museum had a map. We knew what we wanted to see in each. Self-guided audio equipment was available in the major museums. The admission tickets bought in advance are timed admissions at sites with the most significant visitor counts.

Paris has a Museum Pass providing access to many sites within the city for one price. I have used a city pass in New York, Seattle, and other cities. One of my friends said they had used the Paris Museum Pass. The other did not use it. I ended up choosing not to buy it. It was the right call for my trip. I decided I wouldn’t use enough of the options it provided and wanted other options it didn’t cover.

Getting between the activities was the last consideration. Our transportation in the city was via taxi or on foot. I wish we had tried the subways, but we didn’t. Usually, we were trying to get somewhere in a hurry because we had a timed admission ticket. Like my thoughts on the hotel, I didn’t care how we got from place to place. Walking was part of the experience, but any other transportation was just a means to an end.

Everyone’s journey will be different, but I hope you find this helpful in planning your trip customized to your interests and travel preferences. Bon voyage.