Last month, my wife Liliya and I finally took the trip to Paris we have been talking about for the past six years. It wasn’t my first trip there, but it had been long enough since my last visit that whatever travel lessons I had picked up previously were reduced to vague memory. We were effectively starting from scratch as far as being tourists in the ‘city of light’. Now, having had that experience, I’m sharing a few insights that I hope will be helpful for others who are likewise acting on a European travel ambition.
To start, I’ll note that the only ‘pre-vacation’ preparation we did for the trip was:
- Purchasing our flights, in and out of Charles De Gaulle
- Booking a hotel for the first six of eleven nights away
- Subscribing to a roaming data plan (as a Roger’s subscriber, this meant signing up to their ‘Roam from Home’ plan: $10/day)
- Purchasing a ‘Cash Passport’ prepaid travel card from the post office (Full disclosure here… I work for one of the companies behind this card program… and that’s why I’m familiar with this card.)
With that background, here’s what we found….
Google Maps Liberated Us
Though I’m an avid user of Waze when I’m at home, when we first landed at Charles de Gaulle, my first instinct was to secure a map of the Paris Metro. This was one of the few reliable travel rules that I retained from the past: master the Metro map and you’ve mastered the city. It was Liliya who pointed out my methods were obsolete. Using my phone she quickly identified the quickest route to our hotel. And from that point on, navigation became a non-issue. We started each day by identifying a neighbourhood that we wanted to see and took the nearest Metro there. From there we meandered through the city back to our hotel…occasionally checking Google Maps to make sure we were heading in the right direction. Having a phone with data and GPS freed us to head down any boulevard or alley that caught our attention. And this in turn increased our chance of unique and local experiences. Which brings me to my next point…
Paris’s gems are not to be found on the Champs-Élysées
Don’t get me wrong, we did stroll down that famous avenue. But our favourite moments and places were off the beaten path. We found our favourite restaurant (Cremerie Restaurant Polidor) down a narrow street on our way to the better known Boulevard Saint-Germain. And this was a common theme on the trip… our best times were had when we were ‘lost’.
Pre-funding helps take your mind off the cost
On vacation you are pretty much always reaching for your wallet. Take the number of payments you typically make in a day and multiply that by the ‘vacation’ factor. It adds up. And that’s not even taking into account unplanned expenses. In our case, these took the form of shopping (expected to do some, but not that much) and a side trip to London. Normally, I think this rate of spending would have caused an uneasy feeling that we were over-extending and that there would surely be a financial reckoning when we got home. But getting a prepaid travel card before the trip went a long way to fixing that. Very soon after we booked our flights, I went to the post office and purchased a Cash Passport card. (This is a prepaid card that can be loaded with seven different foreign currencies, including Euros.) Over the course of three months prior to take-off, we loaded roughly 250 Euros to the card every other week. It wasn’t overly painful for us to make the bi-weekly deposit… and by the time we landed in Paris, it meant we had a ‘vacation fund’ that we could spend from without impacting our core finances.
And the Cash Passport card had other benefits:
- I downloaded, ‘Zenwallet’, the free cardholder support app that let me track purchases and my account balance in real time. So, I always had a clear view of our trip budget.
- When I first purchased the card, I asked for a second card tied to the same account… so both my wife and I enjoyed the convenience of ‘tap and go’ payments at cafes and shops.
- Through the course of the vacation we made more payments than you’d want to count, both in-store and online; everytime sharing my payment card credentials. I’m not a suspicious person by nature, but even I felt a little bit of relief that I was exposing only my prepaid card number and not any credentials tied to our core accounts at home.
- And finally, the card offered some surprising benefits… most notable being on the London Underground. Instead of queuing up to buy tickets my wife and I learned we could just tap our Cash Passport cards… not only saving time… but also earning up to a 50% discount on every ride!
It’s not a cashless world
Having just extolled the virtues of paying with your prepaid card… I’ll now qualify that sentiment by noting that carrying some local currency is always a good idea. In fact there were at least three occasions where cash was the only payment option: at our (fore-mentioned) favourite restaurant, when purchasing our ‘airport express’ bus ticket and gaining access to most public bathrooms. Not having some cash on hand to pay on any of these occasions would have been inconvenient at least. Fortunately, we found no shortage of ATMs and could easily withdraw local currency with our Cash Passport card… so while we paid almost exclusively with the card… we also had access to cash when needed.
And that’s probably enough to share in one reading. There’s a wealth of city-specific travel advice to be had from folks who have been there before. I’m hopeful that these few tips will contribute to as unique and carefree a European experience and Liliya and I had.
If you are interested in more tips and experiences read our blog onTravel Card Goes Down Under – Millennial’s Eye View