"I landed at CDG on a grey Tuesday morning and took the RER B straight into the city — 35 minutes, €11.80, no stress. Rovago had already planned my first day to start in the Marais, which turned out to be perfect: the neighbourhood wakes up slowly, the bakeries are extraordinary, and the Place des Vosges at 8am with almost no one around is one of those genuinely cinematic moments that Paris keeps handing you for free. I grabbed a croissant from Maison Landemaine on Rue des Archives and sat on a bench eating it like a cliché — and I regret nothing."
"The Eiffel Tower is non-negotiable, but the angle everyone misses is from Trocadéro at sunrise — maybe thirty people there, the whole tower to yourself against a pink sky. I booked skip-the-line summit tickets through Klook and went up at 9am before the queues formed. The view from the top is genuinely dizzying — you can see all the way to La Défense on a clear day. Bring something warm even in summer; the wind at that height is real."
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"For the Louvre, I'd suggest a counter-intuitive strategy: don't try to see it all. Pick three rooms, see them properly, and leave. I went straight for the Vermeer collection, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Dutch Masters — spent two focused hours and left feeling satisfied rather than culturally bludgeoned. The queues for the main pyramid entrance are brutal; use the Porte des Lions entrance on the Seine side instead. I grabbed a Viator walking tour for the first hour which made everything click into context."
"Dinner in Paris doesn't have to be expensive to be extraordinary. I ate my best meal of the trip at a tiny neo-bistro in the 11th arrondissement — no reservations, a chalkboard menu, a rotating wine list, and a chef who came out to talk about where the duck came from. The trick is to walk the side streets between Oberkampf and Parmentier metro stations around 7pm and follow the sound of conversation. Avoid any restaurant with a menu in four languages displayed outside — that's the first rule of eating well in Paris."
"For somewhere to sleep, I used Expedia to find a small 3-star hotel in the 9th arrondissement — walking distance to Pigalle and the Grands Boulevards, half the price of equivalent rooms in Saint-Germain. The 9th is genuinely one of the best neighbourhoods for first-timers: great transport links, excellent cafés, the covered passages just around the corner. I paid €95/night which for Paris felt like stealing."
"My last evening I walked the Seine from the Pont Neuf all the way to the Eiffel Tower as the lights came on — about 4km, completely flat, one of the great urban walks on earth. The booksellers (bouquinistes) along the Left Bank were packing up their green stalls as the river turned golden. I bought a battered 1960s copy of a Cartier-Bresson photo book for €8. Before I left I picked up an Airalo eSIM for my next stop — staying connected across Europe without swapping physical SIMs is genuinely one of the best travel upgrades I've made. Stop dreaming and start packing. Trust Rovago to build your perfect journey today."
