10-Day Itinerary:
London & Paris
Planning your first trip to Europe? This 10-day London and Paris itinerary is the route I design again and again for travelers visiting these iconic cities for the first time.
Ten days. Two iconic cities. Smart pacing.
This sample itinerary shows how I typically structure a trip through London and Paris — blending history, art, food, and culture while still leaving space to explore at your own pace.
It isn’t a package. It’s a starting point.
When we plan together, every hotel, guide, and experience is customized around you.
But this overall flow works beautifully time and time again.
A Quick Note Before We Dive In
The internet will tell you a hundred things you "have to do" in London and Paris. TikTok has an opinion. Your grandma who went in the 1970s has an opinion. Everyone has an opinion.
Here's mine — from someone who actually plans these trips for a living: most of what you think you need to do, you don't. And the things that actually make the trip? Those are specific to you.
This is the 10-day itinerary I design most often for first-timers — mother-daughter trips, graduation trips, and anyone visiting London and Paris for the first time. It's not a rigid schedule. It's a framework that helps you prioritize what matters and skip what doesn't. When we plan together I'll tell you exactly what needs to be booked before you leave — and give you the confidence to let the rest unfold.
Days 1–5: London
Day 1: Arrival & Getting Your Bearings
Private driver from the airport. Today is intentionally light — you're jet-lagged, everything feels enormous, and the worst thing you can do is try to power through a full itinerary. A hop-on hop-off bus with a Thames River cruise is the easiest way to get London's geography into your head while giving yourself permission to sit down every twenty minutes.
I know how that sounds. It sounds touristy. It is. It's also the smartest move on day one, and I'll defend it to anyone who thinks they're above it. Save the real exploring for days two and three when your brain actually works.
Day 2: Royal London
Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London with a Beefeater guide — centuries of royal drama, imprisoned queens, and the Crown Jewels. London history is more entertaining than anyone expects when you have a guide who knows how to tell a story instead of reading a Wikipedia entry. St. James's Park, Buckingham Palace, and Big Ben show up naturally as you move through the day — you don't need to schedule them, they'll find you.
Day 3: Afternoon Tea & London Neighborhoods
A proper afternoon tea is worth doing once. Small sandwiches you'd never eat at home, pastries, actual tea service. Book it early — the good ones fill up weeks out and this is something I handle for every client because the difference between a great tea and a forgettable one is entirely about which room you're sitting in. The rest of the day is yours. Notting Hill, Portobello Road, Covent Garden, or just wandering in a direction that looks interesting. London's neighborhoods are where the city stops being a postcard and starts being a place.
Day 4: Harry Potter Studio Tour
If Harry Potter is on the list — and for graduation trips it almost always is — book the Warner Bros. Studio Tour the same week you book flights. I'm serious. It sells out months in advance, especially in summer, and this is one of the first things I lock down when we plan together. The Great Hall, Diagon Alley, original costumes and sets. Even if you're the parent who hasn't watched the movies since your kid was ten, the production design is genuinely impressive. Plan for most of the day.
If Harry Potter isn't your thing, this becomes a free day — and I'll build it around what you'd rather do. Museum day, market day, neighborhood you haven't seen yet. London has no shortage of options.
Day 5: A Free London Day
Intentionally unscheduled. Borough Market if you want the best food hall in the city. A free museum — the British Museum, the Tate, the V&A — all world-class and all free, which still surprises people. West End theatre in the evening if you want it. Or just wandering somewhere you haven't been and letting London do what it does when you stop trying to optimize it. Some of the best days on any trip are the ones with no plan.
Days 6–10: Paris
Day 6: Eurostar to Paris
High-speed train under the English Channel — two and a half hours, city center to city center. No airport, no security line that makes you question your life choices, no taxi from a suburban terminal. You walk off the train and you're in Paris. Settle in, walk along the Seine, find your first café terrace, order something you can't pronounce. Paris rewards the people who stop moving and start sitting.
Day 7: The Louvre & Historic Paris
The Louvre without a guide is three hours of being lost in a building the size of a small town while looking for a painting that's smaller than you think it is. With the right guide, it's one of the best two hours of the trip — Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, Venus de Milo, and the parts of the palace most people walk right past. I always recommend booking a guide here. It's the difference between "we saw the Louvre" and actually remembering what you saw. Then Sainte-Chapelle, which has stained glass that makes people stop talking mid-sentence. It's a ten-minute visit and worth every one of them.
Day 8: Versailles
Private driver out to the palace. Hall of Mirrors, the royal apartments, gardens that go on longer than you think is possible. Versailles is excessive on purpose — Louis XIV built it to make every other ruler in Europe feel inadequate, and it still works. The gardens alone could fill a morning. Don't rush this one — it earns a full day, and the drive back gives you time to process the fact that one family lived like that while everyone else didn't.
Day 9: Montmartre & Food Tour
Montmartre feels like a village that Paris grew around and never quite absorbed. A guided food and walking tour through local bakeries, fromageries, wine bars, and the narrow streets where artists actually lived before "artist's quarter" became a real estate term. The food on this tour is consistently one of the things my clients mention first when they get home. For mother-daughter trips and graduation trips, this is often the day that turns into the favorite — not because anything dramatic happens, but because you're walking slowly through Paris eating everything in sight. That's enough.
Day 10: Departure
Private transfer to the airport timed around your flight — not a generic checkout-and-hope-for-the-best situation. Most people leave wishing they had one more morning to sit at a café with a croissant and watch Paris happen around them. That feeling means the trip was paced right.
Ready to build your London & Paris trip?
This is the trip where planning matters more than people think. The Harry Potter tour that sells out six months early. The Louvre guide who makes the museum make sense. The afternoon tea that's actually worth the price. The difference between a good first Europe trip and one your family talks about for years comes down to the details — and those are the details I handle.
Planning fee: $250 per family for trips up to two weeks.