First trip to Europe/Mother Daughter Trip

Fly to London spend 4 nights. Take the Eurostar train to Paris 4 nights there. Fly home.

Welcome!
How exciting and fun.

Does your daughter have anywhere in mind that she would like to visit?

What are your interests? Art? Food? History? Outdoors? Etc

You can’t ever go wrong doing the Italian “holy trinity” of Venice, Florence, Rome
All easily done by train

My advice
Make the trip as long as you can- 14 nights if possible
The entire trip could easily be Italy and you’d be able to visit several locations with that amount of time.

Have you researched your flight options?

And your passports! Are they current with the required time format (6 months remaining on them at time of travel)?

The previous poster has the most important issue….check your passports.

My suggestion is by open jaw ticket into London and out of your final stop. Personal idea London-Stockholm-Berlin-somewhere in Switzerland-Paris and home. None of which is anything dtr did in HS.

If you want to do a cruise, skip coming to Europe, if you want luxury it might be late for bookings. You can fly or take train for some legs. Get a RS tour guide too.

I like the idea of starting off in London and then going to Amsterdam and/or Paris. All of them are easy cities to get around in, especially London and Amsterdam, and easy to get to. They're fun and you will have an incredible time. I did a mother/daughter trip to London and Paris many years ago and it was wonderful! Amsterdam, though, is certainly worth looking at as well and I would strongly suggest adding that in, depending on the time you have. You could do 4 nights in each city, which would fill a 2 week trip there (counting travel time)

As this is the Italy forum, there's the idea of the Trinity: Rome-Florence-Venice, which has, perhaps the highest wow per square mile in Italy. But there's something to be said about a relief from the tourist hordes that will be mobbing central Florence and especially touristic Venice. I might throw in side trips from all of those to avoid the barbarian hordes in those areas.

Also, search the forum. Lots of people have done a trip like this, and gotten lots of ideas on how to structure it in a lot of different countries for this time of year.

Last: you are fine on your planning horizon, but get moving.

if you really are "the worst planner," and based on the timing it seems you may be right, pay a good travel agent to put together exactly the trip you want. And they will have suggestions you haven't thought of.

Go to the websites for Travel & Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler and look at their lists of suggested agents.

Only you and your daughter know what you and your daughter would like, actually it might not even be the same things so be prepared.

My daughter and I did Rome-Florence and a night and day in Paris, and it was incredible, but it was off-season. You could try staying at my favorite hotel in Versailles outside of Paris (Le Cheval Rouge)--very simple, affordable and usually good last min availability. My teen would adore more time in Paris, although with their intermittent strikes, it can make it harder to get around affordably. Rome and Florence were way more walkable, but I wouldn't want to brave late spring crowds. Our tour guide showed us pics, and it looked insane.

If you want to keep the planning simple & just copy our Italy 14-day Mother/Daughter itinerary, we had a fantastic time!

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/mother-adult-daughter-italy-trip-aug-sept-2022