Our essential App Stack for France and Paris travel

There was a time when traveling in France meant carrying a Michelin map, a phrasebook, a stack of paper train tickets, printed hotel confirmations and probably a little scrap of paper containing the address of wherever you were sleeping that night.

Today, your phone can do almost all of that.

The trick is not having too many apps. You don’t need nineteen travel apps fighting for your attention. You need a small group of good ones, set up before you leave home, with accounts created, payment information entered and anything useful downloaded for offline use.

These are the apps we consider most useful for traveling in France—and what we actually use each one for.

TripIt: The Master Itinerary

If you’re taking anything more complicated than a simple round-trip flight and one hotel stay, start with TripIt.

TripIt is essentially the filing cabinet for your entire vacation. Forward your confirmation emails for flights, hotels, trains, rental cars and other reservations, and TripIt organizes them chronologically into one itinerary. You can also manually add restaurants, tours, meeting locations, addresses and notes.

This becomes particularly useful on a European trip where you might have a flight to Paris, a train to Bordeaux, several hotels, a rental car, winery reservations, another train back to Paris and eventually a flight home.

Instead of digging through your email asking, “What was the name of that hotel again?” you open TripIt.

There it is.

TripIt also works well for storing the little details that aren’t really reservations at all: where someone is meeting you, which station entrance you’re using, a restaurant address or notes about how you’re getting from one stop to another. You can share the itinerary with the people traveling with you as well.

Our advice is simple: build the entire trip in TripIt before leaving home and make it your master itinerary.

Citymapper: Our Favorite App for Getting Around Paris

Google Maps is excellent.

But for public transportation in Paris, Citymapper is often better.

Tell Citymapper where you are and where you want to go, and it compares combinations of Métro, RER, buses, trams, trains and walking. When service interruptions occur, that information can also influence the route it recommends.

This becomes especially valuable because the fastest theoretical route isn’t always the best route for a traveler.

Maybe one route saves four minutes but requires three transfers and six flights of stairs. Maybe you’re hauling luggage. Maybe you’re traveling with somebody who would much rather walk another five minutes than navigate Châtelet during rush hour.

Citymapper helps you see those choices.

It also offers walking directions, so when you climb out of a Métro station and have absolutely no idea which direction you’re facing—which happens constantly—you can get yourself pointed the right way.

For Paris, this is one of the first apps we want on the phone.

Île-de-France Mobilités: The Official Paris Transit App

Citymapper tells us how to get somewhere.

Île-de-France Mobilités helps us actually use the Paris transportation system.

This is the official app for the Paris-region transit network. Depending on your phone and the ticket you’re purchasing, it can be used to buy Métro, RER, train, bus and tram fares and load them onto compatible phones, watches or Navigo cards.

That distinction is useful:

Citymapper = navigation.

Île-de-France Mobilités = tickets and the official transportation system.

Paris transit ticketing has changed tremendously in recent years and will undoubtedly continue to evolve, so this is also an app worth updating shortly before your trip.

If you’re spending several days in Paris and expect to use public transportation regularly, install it before leaving home rather than attempting to understand Navigo while standing in front of a ticket gate with fifteen Parisians behind you.

SNCF Connect: Essential for Train Travel Around France

If you’re traveling around France by train, download SNCF Connect.

This is the primary SNCF travel app. You can search train schedules, purchase tickets, retrieve existing reservations, monitor delays and changes, and get important information about your journey.

One of the most valuable pieces of information is your train’s platform once it has been assigned.

Anyone who has traveled by train in France knows the ritual. Everyone gathers around the big departure board staring upward until suddenly a platform number appears.

Then everybody moves.

SNCF Connect gives you another source for that information and for any changes affecting the train.

Whenever possible, we add train tickets to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.

And yes, we’re still going to say it:

Print important long-distance train tickets too.

Phones die.

Apps log you out.

Technology chooses inconvenient moments to become philosophical about whether it wants to work.

A folded piece of paper weighs essentially nothing.

Bring the backup.

Google Maps: The Everyday Workhorse

Even with Citymapper installed, Google Maps remains indispensable.

Before leaving home, save the important places for your trip: hotels, restaurants, train stations, markets, museums, wineries, meeting places and anything else you know you’ll be visiting.

There’s a psychological benefit to this that goes beyond navigation. When you arrive in a completely unfamiliar city and open a map containing twenty places you’ve already saved, the city suddenly begins making sense.

You can see that your restaurant is three blocks from your hotel.

You notice that tomorrow’s museum is near a wine bar you’ve been wanting to visit.

You realize that the bakery somebody recommended is directly on your morning walk.

Also download offline maps for the areas you’re visiting.

This matters considerably more once you leave major cities. Drive through rural Burgundy, the Loire Valley, Bordeaux or Provence and eventually your cellular signal may become less enthusiastic about participating in the trip.

Offline maps are cheap insurance.

One more rule: save your hotel the moment you arrive, and take a photo of your room number.

Finishing dinner in an unfamiliar city and realizing nobody remembers the name of the hotel is funny exactly once.

Jason’s Google Maps Super Tip: Make three categories for saving things.

This tip helps your Google Maps stay organized and fun, rather than a hodgepodge of files and tags. It also makes it better and better the more you use it.

1) Places I want to go.

When you watch a YouTube video and start drooling while watching the review of a Paris bistro, or you find that perfect park for a picnic in Paris, you can immediately save it into your want to go list. Mine has over 1000 entries worldwide, including in cities I doubt I’ll ever visit. It makes for fun browsing.

2) Place I’ve been that I’ve loved.

When you have one of those awesome experiences that you want to remember forever, go ahead a take a hundred photos (which you may or may not look at again), and add it to this list in Google Maps. Over time this builds a library that is not only great for sharing tips with your friends, but it makes for the most peaceful random scrolling on your phone before you fall asleep, with all the happy memories fresh in your brain. Those memories make it easy to find the photos you took as well.

3) Places I didn’t like/hated.

Hopefully this doesn’t become a big list, and for me a place has to REALLY suck to be on it. For me, it goes beyond just a bad experience and into something I shake my head about and laugh later on. “Can you even believe how bad that was?” I once caught myself about to enter a restaurant in Italy that I was at years before, mainly because it looked really cute from the outside. Then something in me said hold on a sec, you’ve been here before. I pulled out my phone a remembered the horrible overpriced food and terrible service, including trying to charge me for tap water.

Google Translate: Your Emergency French Department

We strongly believe travelers should learn some basic French.

Bonjour. Merci. S’il vous plaît. L’addition, s’il vous plaît. Parlez-vous anglais?

You don’t need to become fluent. You simply need to demonstrate that you’re making an effort.

Then let Google Translate handle the difficult stuff.

Download French for offline use before leaving home. You can translate typed text, spoken language and—most importantly for travelers—text through the phone’s camera.

Point it at a menu.

Point it at a sign.

Point it at instructions.

Point it at the washing machine in your vacation rental whose designers apparently assumed everyone on earth possesses an advanced degree in French laundry technology.

The camera translation function is fantastic.

But don’t use Google Translate as permission to skip basic courtesy. Walking into a shop and immediately shoving a translated sentence into someone’s face isn’t particularly charming.

Start with:

“Bonjour!”

Try what you know.

Then use the technology.

G7: Our First Choice for a Car in Paris

If you’re going to Paris, download G7 Taxi.

This might be the transportation app American travelers are least familiar with—and one of the most useful.

G7 works much like Uber or Bolt. You enter your destination, request a vehicle, watch it arrive and can arrange payment through the app.

But G7 sends you an official licensed Paris taxi, and that distinction matters.

Paris taxis have advantages that rideshare vehicles don’t necessarily have, including access to certain dedicated taxi and bus lanes. When traffic becomes ugly—and Paris is extremely capable of producing ugly traffic—a taxi may be able to move through lanes that an Uber or Bolt cannot.

Taxi pricing is also regulated rather than governed by surge pricing.

That becomes especially appealing for airport transportation. Official Paris taxis use regulated flat fares between Charles de Gaulle Airport and central Paris. Know the current fare before your trip, go to the official taxi rank, and there’s very little mystery about what the ride should cost.

G7 provides many of the conveniences people like about rideshares while retaining the advantages of the official taxi system. You can request a taxi immediately, reserve one ahead of time, track the vehicle and pay through the app. G7 also offers options for larger vehicles, families, accessibility needs and other specialized situations.

It even has a useful feature called G7 Connect that allows you to get into an available G7 taxi on the street and then connect that ride to your app for payment and records.

For Paris, we’d put G7 near the top of the list.

G7 vs. Bolt and Uber

We still download Bolt.

And we still keep Uber.

There is no reason to become doctrinaire about transportation.

Sometimes Bolt is cheaper.

Sometimes Uber has a car two minutes away.

Sometimes G7 is clearly the better choice.

Open the apps and compare.

But American travelers shouldn’t automatically assume that rideshare is the superior option simply because Uber is what they use at home. Paris has a mature, heavily regulated taxi system, and taxis can have meaningful advantages.

The dedicated lanes can save time in traffic. Airport fares are predictable. Taxi stands exist at airports, train stations and major locations. Available taxis can be hailed on the street. And official taxis are equipped for credit-card payment.

There’s also an important little money-saving distinction: if you’re standing at a taxi rank and there is already an available taxi waiting, just take it.

You don’t need to use G7 to summon the exact same type of taxi that’s sitting twenty feet away. G7 reservations can carry booking charges, whereas walking up to an official taxi rank avoids the reservation fee.

Our approach in Paris is roughly:

G7 first, particularly when traffic, an airport or a scheduled pickup matters.

Bolt and Uber when price or nearby availability makes them more attractive.

Transportation isn’t a loyalty program.

Use whatever makes sense at that moment.

Your Airline App: Boring Until Suddenly Very Important

Download your airline’s app before leaving home.

Delta. Air France. United. American. Lufthansa.

Whatever you’re flying.

Most of the trip, you may barely open it.

Then your gate changes. Your flight is delayed. Your connection gets changed. Your seat moves. Your boarding pass disappears. Suddenly the airline app is very important.

Log into the account before the trip. Make sure your reservation appears correctly. Turn on notifications and add boarding passes to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet when available.

The airport is a terrible place to discover that you don’t remember the password you created six years ago.

Apple Wallet or Google Wallet: Put the Important Stuff There

Apple Wallet and Google Wallet aren’t really France travel apps, but they should become central to how you travel.

Put eligible boarding passes there. Put train tickets there. Put event tickets there. Put supported transit fares there.

The advantage is speed.

You don’t want to be standing at a Métro gate opening SNCF Connect, waiting for it to load, searching for the ticket and accidentally opening a Bordeaux reservation from three days later.

Wallet puts the thing you need immediately where you can get to it immediately.

But for critical travel documents, particularly long-distance rail, we still believe in backups.

Digital first.

Paper somewhere in the bag.

WhatsApp: More Useful in Europe Than Many Americans Expect

If you don’t already use WhatsApp, install it.

Europe uses WhatsApp far more heavily than many Americans do, and you may find yourself communicating with hotels, guides, drivers, rental-property owners, wineries and other businesses through it.

It’s particularly convenient internationally because communication travels over Wi-Fi or cellular data rather than depending on traditional international SMS.

Someone will eventually say:

“WhatsApp me when you’re close.”

At that point you’ll be glad you already installed it and created the account.

Set Everything Up at Home

Downloading an app isn’t enough.

Set it up.

This might be the single best piece of technology advice we can give you.

Create your accounts.

Log in.

Enter your credit card.

Load your reservations.

Download your maps.

Download French in Google Translate.

Build your TripIt itinerary.

Make sure your SNCF tickets appear.

Create the G7 account.

Set up Bolt and Uber.

Make sure WhatsApp actually works.

Check your airline reservation.

Do all of this while sitting at home with reliable Wi-Fi.

The wrong time to discover that an app wants to text a verification code to an old telephone number is while standing outside Gare Montparnasse with luggage.

Preparation removes friction.

And removing friction leaves more time for the fun stuff.

The Flying Grape France Phone Setup

If we were leaving for France tomorrow, our phones would contain:

TripIt — master itinerary and organization.

Citymapper — navigating Paris.

Île-de-France Mobilités — Paris transit tickets and official transportation information.

SNCF Connect — train travel throughout France.

Google Maps — walking, driving, saved locations and offline navigation.

Google Translate — language help.

G7 Taxi — our first-choice car service in Paris.

Bolt — rideshare and price comparison.

Uber — another useful transportation option.

Our airline’s app — flights and disruptions.

WhatsApp — communication with hotels, drivers, guides and other businesses.

And we’d load frequently used tickets and boarding passes into Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.

That’s enough.

You could probably find another fifty travel apps.

We don’t want fifty travel apps.

The goal isn’t to turn your phone into mission control.

We want TripIt to tell us where we’re supposed to be, Citymapper to tell us how to get there, SNCF Connect to tell us where our train is leaving, Google Translate to rescue our French, and G7 to get us home when we’ve walked fourteen miles and our feet have officially resigned.

Then comes the most important step.

Put the phone away.

Look around.

You’re in France.

Download Before You Go

Don’t try to download and install apps while standing in line and trying to create a new account.

Do it before you go.

One final suggestion: after downloading everything, put these apps together in a “France” or “Travel” folder on your home screen.

When you’re standing in Gare de Lyon with luggage, you don’t want to remember whether SNCF Connect is on screen three or buried somewhere between your banking app and Wordle.