Paris Visite

This is a tourist product designed to hose tourists. It is almost never a good deal. If your time in Paris will fall between Monday-Sunday of a week then the Navigo Decouverte is the pass to get. If you lap over a weekend and don't fit the times for this pass then you are almost always better off with ordinary tickets purchased in units of 10 i.e. a carnet for 13.70.

Thank you so much. I noticed that RS does not mention it and so I was thinking that it might not be such a great idea. Can you help me with 2 more questions?

1) The RER from CDG to Gare du Nord can take Metro tickets or do we need a special ticket?

2) I'm traveling from Paris to Vichy round trip. Would it be worth it to get some sort of pass? If I purchase a non-consecutive day pass maybe I could also travel into the Loire Valley and back to Paris from there.

We want to travel as inexpensively as possible and the transportation issue seems to be quite confusing. Thank you again for your help.

What Rick's books say about it (p. 35 in Paris or p. 68 in France) is, "The overpriced Paris Visite Passes are poorly designed for tourists and offer minor reductions at minor sites." You will need to buy a special RER ticket at CDG to get you into the city, about 10 euros. You can buy a Carnet of tickets or Passe Navigo at the airport ticket office at the same time and request just the city center region.

Trains to other towns, such as Vichy and Chartres are on a separate system, but those two roundtrips are not long enough to make a France rail pass pay off. Rick’s France rail travel page has the link and tips for buying “Prems” rate TGV tickets through SNCF (cheap, reserved, nonrefundable, available three or four months ahead of your travel date) to print at home and pay with PayPal. It does not tend to work with US credit cards, unless you have an extra level of security set up. Prems rate to Vichy is 15 euros each way, versus full fare of about 53 euros. Tickets to Chartres only cost 15 euros regular fare.