Things to Do in Paris: What to Book, What to Simply Walk Into

Paris is the largest sightseeing machine in Europe — a city of 2,103,778 people on 105.4 km², inhabited since around 300 BC, whose monuments now run on timed tickets almost across the board. The catalogue we track lists 4,784 bookable experiences here at a median of €100, ranging from €17 at the cheapest to €399 at the top, with 138,865 reviews behind them.

The shape of that catalogue tells you what kind of city this is. Paris does not simply sell tickets — it sells the queue: 8 of the 50 products we track are skip-the-line products, and 11 are flagged as likely to sell out. The planning problem is not finding things to do. It is deciding which three or four lines are worth paying to avoid, and which of the city's best hours are free.

Which Paris tickets should you book before you fly?

Four: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, and Versailles if a day trip is planned. All four run on timed entry, and the pressure shows in the catalogue we track: 11 of 50 products are flagged as likely to sell out. Everything else in Paris tolerates same-week planning.

The calendar does half the sorting for you. The Louvre closes on Tuesdays; the Musée d'Orsay and the Château de Versailles close on Mondays. Fix those three around your dates first, then drop the Eiffel Tower into whichever evening survives — the tower opens daily, and its slots are the ones that vanish earliest.

Eiffel Tower: lift, stairs or summit — what to book?

The catalogue's two Eiffel Tower products disagree in a useful way: reserved lift access to the second floor or summit costs €32 and rates 4.18 across 7,554 reviews, while the guided climb by stairs costs €44 and rates 4.79 across 5,493 reviews. The harder, dearer way up leaves people happier.

The logic holds once you see the tower as two trips in one. The stairs reach the second floor — close enough to the iron to touch it, with a guide narrating Gustave Eiffel's 1889 gamble — and the summit remains a lift ride from there. Official tickets sold at toureiffel.paris are the cheapest route up; the catalogue products earn their margin when official slots for your dates are gone, or when you want the story told while you climb. The tower stands on the Champ de Mars in the 7th arrondissement — one of the numbered municipal districts that spiral clockwise out from the Louvre.

Louvre: how to see the Mona Lisa without losing a day

Book entry with a plan, or book a guide. The most-reviewed product in the entire Paris catalogue is a Louvre masterpieces guided tour — 13,114 reviews, rated €4.5,64 for 2.5 hours. Its small-group rival costs €63 — one euro less — and rates 4.95 across 6,989 reviews. The six-guest cap, not the price, is the difference.

The Mona Lisa hangs in the Salle des États in the Denon wing, and the room around her absorbs most of the museum's crowding — which is why a guided route that sequences her early or late outperforms wandering. The museum is closed on Tuesdays, and the collection is too large for completism: 2.5 hours with a plan beats six hours without one. Both tours run the same length for effectively the same money; a 0.45-point rating gap for €1 is the cheapest upgrade in the city.

Musée d'Orsay: the Impressionists in a train station

The Musée d'Orsay holds the world's densest collection of Impressionist painting — Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Degas — inside a converted 1900 railway station on the Left Bank of the Seine. It runs on timed tickets, closes on Mondays, and rewards a focused half day rather than a full one.

Orsay is the natural second museum of a Paris trip: smaller than the Louvre, easier to finish, and directly across the river from the Tuileries, so the two pair into one long day with a garden walk between them. The upper level — the Impressionist gallery under the station clock — is the part that fills first; start there. Tickets and closing days are published by the museum at musee-orsay.fr.

Notre-Dame de Paris: free again, but timed

Notre-Dame de Paris reopened in December 2024, five years after the fire, and entry to the cathedral is free — the queue is managed through free timed reservations released online, with a walk-up line that moves when reservations run out. It is the one great Paris interior that costs nothing.

The cathedral anchors the Île de la Cité, the island where the city began, and shares it with Sainte-Chapelle — whose 13th-century stained glass is ticketed, timed and worth the small detour. Treat the island as one visit: cathedral, chapel, and the flower market between them, then cross to either bank on foot.

Seine cruise: when the river earns a dinner

The two flagship dinner cruises are statistically the same product: Bateaux Parisiens at €124.70 for 2.5 hours, rated 4.41 across 7,361 reviews, against Bateaux Mouches at €123.58 for 3 hours, rated 4.43 across 5,106 reviews. €1.12 and 0.02 rating points separate them — choose by departure dock, not by brand.

That near-tie is the honest verdict on the Seine: the river view is a commodity, and what you pay for is the table. The banks themselves — the quays, the bridges, the bouquinistes, the green second-hand bookstalls bolted to the parapets — deliver the same panorama free at walking pace. Since 88% of the Paris catalogue cancels free, holding an evening cruise and dropping it for weather costs nothing.

In Paris the monuments are the bottleneck and the river is the reward — you fight for a Louvre slot, and then the Seine only asks whether you want dinner with your view.

Iracema Melo, on planning a first Paris trip

Eiffel Tower, Louvre, cruises and day trips in one table

Prices, durations and ratings below are the catalogue figures we track today; official monument tickets are sold by each institution directly.

Montmartre and Sacré-Cœur: the free hilltop

Montmartre is the free counterweight to the ticketed city. The Sacré-Cœur basilica charges nothing to enter, the climb through the winding streets of the 18th arrondissement costs nothing, and the terrace in front of the basilica is the widest free view of Paris there is.

Go early or go late. By mid-morning the Place du Tertre — the portraitists' square behind the basilica — is at full tourist density, and the village character survives best at its edges: the vineyard on Rue des Saules, the quiet slope down the back toward Lamarck. Only the basilica's dome is ticketed; everything else on the hill is street.

Le Marais: Paris without tickets

Le Marais is the best unticketed day in Paris: the aristocratic quarter the Revolution left behind, now layered with the historic Jewish quarter around Rue des Rosiers, galleries, and shops that — unusually for Paris — open on Sundays.

Its centrepiece, the Place des Vosges, is the city's oldest planned square and costs nothing, and the Musée Carnavalet — the museum of the history of Paris — admits visitors to its permanent collection free. Between the falafel line on Rue des Rosiers and the arcades of the square, the district fills exactly the half day that timed museum tickets leave stranded.

Versailles, Normandy or the Loire: which day trip?

Versailles is the half-day classic — 40 minutes out on the RER C, closed Mondays, timed palace entry. But the catalogue numbers crown the long hauls: the Normandy D-Day day trip, €100 for 14 hours, rates 4.82 across 9,489 reviews — the second most-reviewed product in the entire Paris catalogue.

The Loire Valley castles trip runs €94 for 13 hours and rates 4.68 across 4,577 reviews — the same formula of one long bus day traded for sights no métro reaches. The honest sequencing: Versailles fits a first visit of three days or more; Normandy and the Loire belong to second visits or longer stays, because each consumes a full sightseeing day. For destinations beyond the Paris orbit, start from our France country page.

How the arrondissements organise Paris

The arrondissements spiral clockwise from the Louvre like a snail shell, and the low numbers hold most of the sights. Wikivoyage structures its visitor's map of Paris around the central districts, the 1st through the 12th — which is where nearly everything in this guide sits, except Montmartre up in the 18th.

The number is a distance-from-centre reading: 1st to 7th means monuments and museums, 8th to 12th means boulevards, opera and the everyday city, and the teens mean neighbourhoods. An address's arrondissement is written into its postcode — 75007 is the 7th — so the system doubles as the fastest way to judge where anything is.

Rive Droite

The Right Bank, north of the Seine — the Louvre, Le Marais, Montmartre and the grands boulevards; the larger, busier half of the city.

Rive Gauche

The Left Bank, south of the river — the Eiffel Tower, the Musée d'Orsay, the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Île de la Cité

The island in the Seine where Paris began, holding Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle; bank-to-bank, it is the hinge of any walking day.

Bouquinistes

The second-hand booksellers whose green boxes line the river parapets on both banks — a UNESCO-recognised trade, and the cheapest souvenir stop in the city.

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