Paris transportation

No need for the carnet or individual metro tickets. When you buy the pass, you get both a card and a ticket. The ticket cycles through the turnstile like any other ticket and you just keep using it. The card is for museums and such, it has nothing to do with transportation.

I think that Ed is referring to the Paris Pass which includes a Paris Museum pass and a Paris Visite pass. I assume you are talking about the Paris Visite pass alone. Yes, it goes in the turnstile. The Paris Visite pass is overpriced. There are better options. How many days will you be in Paris? What day of the week will you arrive and what day of the week will you depart?

Nope. I know what the Paris Pass is and it's a screw job. My only knowledge of the Viste Pass consists of telling a buddy to buy us a carnet and he out-clevered himself and came back with the Viste which consisted of two hunks of plastic and the two metro turnstile tickets. I forget the details, but the pamphlet said you'd get a bit off for the Arc and a bunch of other places, probably not the big museums and such, we chunked that. The stinking Viste was good for just one day and cost about what a carnet would have. I bought us a carnet the next day, and in the remaing three days we never used them up since we just had to commute back and forth from the back of the Montmarte butte and made one trip from around Cite to Trocadero in the rain. The only use I made of the plastic was to scrape ice off the windshield in Aachen a few days later. I forget exactly what it looked like, but it was dark, had an Eiffel Tower sketch that looked like a capital A, and an RATP logo. Actually, I think both are screw jobs. Paris is pretty walkable - - the longest stretch for most people is probably from the cathedral to the tower or the arc and even those are easy forty-five minute humps. A carnet will go a long way for two people and lasts forever.

I personally like the convenience of a Paris Visite Pass and get a lot of use out of one. I'm quite familiar with the bus routes by now and was on the buses and the Metro several times a day, even for short hops, when I was there in May. This last time we went, we chose the comfort and convenience of a large, affordable apartment, across the street from the Parmentier Metro (found through the Homeaway.co.uk site). We knew that we would be ranging widely from that location, which was also very well-served by buses. The Paris Visite pass made absolute sense for us. The best value card, for me at least, is the 5-days Zones 1-3. I don't think that a pass for one day only is cost efficient. As for paying for the Zones 1-5, it's best to seriously consider just how many occasions that you will indeed venture beyond Zone 3. It's not difficult to buy a one-of-top-up ticket to go the extra distance, IMO. The Pass ticket looks like one of the regular ones. You simply keep using it at the turnstiles and in the bus machines for its duration. Just remember to always grab it back and tuck it away with each use - they can be easily lost.