France

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. A Bordeaux Travel Guide From Someone Who Almost Skipped It I’ll be honest: I nearly cut Bordeaux from the trip. I had it filed under “city you go to for the wine,” and since that’s not my thing, I figured a single afternoon would do. Two days later I was still there, walking the same honey-coloured quay for the third time at dusk because I couldn’t quite believe a city could be this good-looking without trying. So if you’re here thinking Bordeaux isn’t for you, stick around. It might be the easiest French city break you’ve never planned. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from Paris to Barcelona, Starting at €19 I’d booked the train. Had my TGV ticket for €89, a good seat, and a vague plan to watch the Pyrenees roll past the window. Then a colleague mentioned she’d just flown for €19. I checked, found a Vueling seat for €23 the following week, and cancelled the train without a second thought. That’s the dynamic on cheap flights from Paris to Barcelona: there are so many airlines fighting over this route that the price can drop lower than a decent meal. And the flight is just 1 hour 45 minutes. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from Paris to Marrakech, Starting at €29 My friend Marion called it “the shortest escape from grey.” She’d booked a €34 Transavia one-way from Orly on a Tuesday in October and was sitting in Jemaa el-Fnaa square, hands wrapped around a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, less than five hours after leaving her apartment in the 11th. That’s the thing about cheap flights from Paris to Marrakech: the journey is quick, the price gap between booking blind and booking smart is enormous, and the destination rewards you every single time. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from Paris to Porto — and Why Everyone’s Going I nearly talked myself out of booking it. The fare was €27 on a Tuesday in February — so cheap I assumed I’d misread it or there was a catch hiding in the fine print. There wasn’t. I was sitting on the Ribeira riverfront eating a pastel de nata and watching the Dom Luís I bridge glow in the afternoon light less than three hours after leaving Paris. Cheap flights from Paris to Porto are that simple, and that good. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The French Riviera Travel Guide That Skips the Yacht Fantasy The first time I went to the Côte d’Azur, I’d half-convinced myself I needed money I didn’t have to enjoy it. Then a guy at my guesthouse in Nice handed me a €1.50 wedge of socca from the Cours Saleya market, told me to take the little coastal train to Menton, and that single afternoon — sea on my left the whole way, towns sliding past the window — cost me less than a coffee back home. The Riviera I’d been sold and the Riviera I found were two different places. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Mont-Saint-Michel & Normandy: Where to Start We almost did Mont-Saint-Michel as a three-hour stop. Drive in, photograph the abbey, drive out before dark. A guesthouse owner near Bayeux talked us out of it over a plate of galettes: “You’ll arrive with the coach crowds, climb the same staircase as four thousand other people, and leave before the tide does the one thing it came to do.” So we stayed the night. By eight that evening the day-trippers had drained away, the ramparts were almost empty, and the bay began to fill — and that’s the version of the island almost nobody plans for. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Paris, Without the Rookie Mistakes We booked our first Paris trip for the first week of August, because that was the week work let us go. A friend who’d lived in the 11th just shook her head: “Half my favourite bakeries will have the metal shutter down, and you’ll be queuing in the heat for everything.” She wasn’t wrong. We went anyway, learned the hard way, and the next time we came back in late September the whole city felt like a different, calmer place for less money. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. A Provence Travel Guide for People Short on Time We almost skipped the lavender. The plan was a lazy week of café terraces in Aix-en-Provence and not much else, until a woman at the Tuesday market — handing me a wedge of tomme and pointing at a basket of dried purple stems — said we’d be mad to come this close and not drive up to Valensole. So we did, early, and pulled over on an empty road between two seas of lavender with the light still soft and not another car in sight. That detour became the trip. The mistake we nearly made is the one this Provence travel guide is built to stop you making. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit France, in One Sentence We had the first week of August circled for Paris and Provence, mostly because that was when work shut down. Then a French friend laughed at me over coffee: “Half of Paris will be closed, and you’ll be stuck in Provence traffic behind every family in the country.” She wasn’t wrong. I checked, and the same trip in late June came back cheaper and, by every account, far calmer. We moved it, watched the lavender start to color the plateau near Sault with the roads still half-empty, and lower down I’ll admit the one date we still got wrong. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from New York to Paris, Starting at $199 Last January my wife and I stood at the Norse Atlantic gate at JFK, watching the agent tag a bag we should never have been paying for at the counter. That one mistake cost us almost $90 — and it’s the one nearly everyone makes on this route. The flight itself? We’d booked it for $214 each, one-way, a night crossing that dropped us into a grey Paris dawn the morning we’d planned to surprise my parents outside Tours. Cheap flights from New York to Paris really do start around $199 one-way on the low-cost carriers, and in the quiet winter months a nonstop round trip under $400 is genuinely on the table. The catch is the part that got me: knowing which airline to pick, and when, because the same JFK to CDG seat can cost $199 or $900 depending on the date. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Cheap Flights from Paris to Lisbon: How I Paid €23 My wife had the easyJet checkout open, finger on the button, €44 staring back at us. Same Friday-evening departure, same kind of November weekend. I told her to wait thirty seconds and ran the search across both Paris airports instead — and there it was, Transavia out of Orly for €23. We booked it, and that €21 we didn’t spend covered every pastel de nata we ate over three days. Cheap flights from Paris to Lisbon really do start around €19 one-way, but only if you stop checking one airline at a time. ...