France travel tips

Budget travel in France

What a visitor's money does in France: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.

Expensive average across 15 guides · 5 is very cheap

Money

Euro (EUR) · 1 EUR = 1.15 USD · 1 EUR = 0.86 GBP

Euro is the currency. Avoid exchanging at airports or tourist traps near the Louvre. Cards are accepted almost everywhere.

ATMs

Avoid: Euronet, Travelex, independent ATMs near the Louvre and Montmartre

Use: BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale, LCL

Standalone machines in tourist areas charge €3-5 per withdrawal; French bank ATMs generally do not.

Getting around

A short ride in Paris: €10–18 across town — pricey

From the airport: CDG to central Paris is a flat €62 (Right Bank) or €69 (Left Bank) by taxi

Much the same. The flat airport rate is a taxi rule and the apps price against it.

City by city, cheapest first

Corsica Good value

Charcuterie from pigs that eat chestnuts, brocciu cheese in everything from omelettes to cake, and wild boar stew in the interior. The wine is good and barely leaves the island.

Marseille Mid-range

Bouillabaisse properly made is expensive, takes two days’ notice at the serious places, and is nothing like the tourist version on the Vieux-Port. The North African food here is the best in France — couscous, brik, and the markets at Noailles.

Strasbourg Mid-range

Alsace eats like nowhere else in France: choucroute, tarte flambée on thin dough from a wood oven, baeckeoffe, and Riesling and Gewürztraminer by the pitcher. A winstub is the local institution and the food is heavy on purpose.

Bordeaux Mid-range

Canelés, small, dark and rum-scented, from Baillardran or better from a small pâtisserie. Entrecôte grilled over vine cuttings, oysters from Arcachon with a small hot sausage beside them, and lamprey cooked in red wine if you are feeling brave.

Lyon Mid-range

A bouchon is a specific thing: small, loud, and serving offal to people who want it — quenelles, andouillette, tablier de sapeur. The ones with the certificate on the door are the real ones. Praline tarts are violently pink and worth it. Beaujolais is half an hour north.

Annecy Mid-range

Lake fish, which here means féra and omble chevalier, both of them local and neither of them cheap; tartiflette and reblochon from the valleys behind the town; and the Thursday market in the old town, which is where to buy the cheese rather than in a shop.

Chamonix Expensive

Savoyard and unapologetic: fondue, raclette, tartiflette with reblochon, and croziflette, which is the same idea with buckwheat pasta. The mountain restaurants above the town are dearer than the ones in it, and the ones in Argentière, ten minutes up the valley, are cheaper than both.

Alpe d’Huez Expensive

Unremarkable and priced for a captive resort. The exception is the mountain restaurants on the Sarenne side, which are old farm buildings rather than cafeterias. Savoyard food, and Grenoble walnuts in everything sweet.

Paris Expensive

Skip restaurants directly facing major landmarks. Walk one block away for better food at half the price. Never skip a fresh baguette from a boulangerie.

Nice Expensive

Local specialities are socca (chickpea pancake), pissaladière and salade niçoise, which contains no cooked vegetables if made properly. Eat socca hot from Chez Thérésa in the old town.

Provence Expensive

The market is the meal. Every town has its day — Aix on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, Apt on Saturday, Isle-sur-la-Sorgue on Sunday — and buying lunch from it costs a quarter of a restaurant and is better. Rosé is drunk cold, at lunch, and nobody thinks less of you.

Tignes Expensive

Plain and functional — this is not a gastronomic resort and does not pretend to be. Savoyard staples, a few good mountain restaurants, and Les Brévières down the valley for the one place that feels like a village rather than a lift station.

Méribel Expensive

Savoyard, and the mountain restaurants in this valley are better value than Courchevel’s across the ridge. Beaufort cheese, diots, fondue. The supermarket run from Moûtiers on the way up is what a self-catering week is built on.

Val d’Isère Very expensive

Mountain restaurants at mountain prices, and the village ones are barely better. Diots — Savoyard sausages in white wine — and beaufort cheese are the local things worth ordering. The supermarket in the village is where a self-catering week stops being ruinous.

Courchevel Very expensive

This is where the Alps keep their Michelin stars, and also where a sandwich costs what a meal does elsewhere. Le Praz and 1550, the two lower villages, are where the ordinary restaurants are. Savoyard food throughout: fondue, beaufort, diots.

The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.

The guides in France

bridge during night timeParisFranceThe city of light, love, and croissantsan aerial view of a city next to the oceanNiceFranceThe French Riviera at its most liveableRows of lavender in flower on the Valensole plateau in Provence at first lightProvenceFranceLavender, limestone villages and a light that brought half the painters of Europe here and kept themsnow covered mountain under blue sky during daytimeChamonixFranceThe town at the foot of Mont Blanc, where alpinism was invented and where the Aiguille du Midi cable car puts you at 3,842 metres in twenty minuteslow angle photo of white concrete buildingBordeauxFranceAn eighteenth-century city of pale stone, with the world’s most famous vineyards half an hour outbrown concrete building near river during daytimeLyonFranceTwo rivers, Roman ruins on the hill, secret passages through the buildings, and the food capital of Francea harbor filled with lots of boats next to a cityMarseilleFranceFrance’s oldest city, a Mediterranean port with limestone fjords on its southern edgeHistoric buildings reflected in a calm canal waterwayStrasbourgFranceHalf-timbered houses over canals, a cathedral that was the tallest building on earth for two centuries, and Germany across the riverwhite and black rock formation on blue sea under blue and white cloudy sky during daytimeCorsicaFranceA mountain range in the sea, with the GR20 down its spine and water the colour of a swimming pool around itgreen lake surrounded by mountains under white clouds and blue sky during daytimeAnnecyFranceA canal town on the clearest lake in Europe, an hour from Geneva and forty minutes from the nearest ski lift — the base people use when the whole family does not skiman in orange jacket and black pants riding ski blades on snow covered mountain during daytimeVal d’IsèreFranceA high resort that links with Tignes into the Espace Killy, holds snow into May, and has a village underneath the ski area rather than a car parka snow covered mountain with a ski lift in the distanceCourchevelFranceFour villages stacked up one mountainside, from a working valley town to the most expensive address in the Alps, all of them on the Trois Vallées lift passa couple of people walking across a snow covered fieldTignesFranceA resort built high and ugly on purpose, with a glacier that skis in summer, a lake that freezes hard enough to walk on, and the snow record to justify all of itMéribel at dusk, the village lights under a pink skyMéribelFranceThe middle valley of the Trois Vallées, built in wood and stone by a Scotsman who thought concrete resorts were a mistake, and still the only one that looks like a villageaerial view of snow covered mountainsAlpe d’HuezFranceA sunny plateau above Grenoble with the longest black run in the Alps dropping off the back of it, and twenty-one hairpins of Tour de France road climbing up to it