I used social media to plan my Paris holiday. Result? Lots of queuing

When I heard the news that Paris was to close its last tourist information office in January, now requiring visitors to go online for inspiration, a little piece of my heart closed with it. I’ve fond memories of these Parisian hubs of local knowledge.

At 16, I went on a school trip to the French capital, where we were required to find something called “le syndicat d’initiative”. Here, we were promised, we’d find experts to guide us to various cultural landmarks. We were to tick off these cultural landmarks in our exercise books as we went.

The visitor reception centre on Quai Jacques-Chirac was the final one in Paris to close its doors.Credit: Getty Images

Several of us didn’t even know what such a place might be – an initiative syndicate sounded like something dystopian dreamt up by Margaret Atwood – but it was within these bureaux that we first got to speak GCSE-standard French to actual French people, who helped us locate the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

And now they are no more. But then we’re living in the screen age these days, aren’t we? While that final tourist office did help 150,000 sightseers in 2024, a decade previously it was over half a million, and so the inference is unequivocal: visitors today travel by TikTok. The trouble with this is that TikTok skews young, and not all of us are.

As my not-young wife and I travel there by Eurostar one early February morning, I download the app, and suddenly, in my 50s, I’m part of the modern world. I do not wish to suggest here that I’m a technophobe – I have been switching my own computer on and off all by myself for the past 30 years – but in the same way that my daughters won’t listen to any music I recommend on a point of teenage principle, so I baulk at the prospect of gazing into my phone while a 20-something American instructs me on how to butter my muffin.

The TikTok effect … queues where you wouldn’t normally expect them.Credit: Alamy

Nevertheless, needs must, and once we’ve cleared the tunnel, I start scrolling. Oh, but there’s so very much content. I’m warned to avoid the 18th arrondissement (“dangerous”), not to let strangers attach a bracelet to my wrist (“they’ll make you pay for it”), alongside an awful lot of hard recommends for hot chocolate, and a restaurant someone once went to where they ate a nice plate of boeuf (beef).

It all passes so fast – the average TikTok video lasts just a minute (my 16-year-old daughter explains: “People don’t have much attention on TikTok. What you have to say, say fast”) – and so it’s difficult to take it all in. I didn’t catch the name of the boeuf restaurant. “Did you favourite the post?” my wife asks. “Favourite?” I say. The tourist office would have given me a map, and marked its location with a cross.

By the time we arrive into Gare du Nord – freezing cold, light drizzle – my iPhone battery has already plummeted to 48 per cent. This is concerning. I am here with my wife not just because I like her company but because her phone is newer, and its juice lasts longer. Mustn’t lose her.

Paris had been our first weekend away together back in the 1990s, a notionally romantic weekend in a grotty two-star hotel. This time, the accommodation is a vast improvement. If La Fantaisie, in the 9th arrondissement, looks fetching on Instagram, it’s even better in real life. The staff are delightful, and there’s birdsong in the lift. The corridors smell of lavender. Our room overlooks a pretty garden that, I feel, would be more impressive in the spring. You don’t come to Paris in February for flora.

An hour later, phone charged, TikTok has encouraged us onto the number 40 bus whose commuter route is fetching enough for tourists, weaving though Abbesses and up into Montmartre, its cobblestone streets flanked with boulangeries and flower shops. After watching the sunset from the top of the hill, we make our way back to the hotel for cocktails in the swanky rooftop bar, where the city reveals itself to be very nearly as photogenic as Venice.

Hotel La Fantaisie: delightful.

The egalitarian nature of TikTok means that anyone can make recommendations. Who to listen to? We spend hours scrolling, earnestly making a list, then realise it would take weeks to visit them all. And so, inspired by a post in which a young woman with Emily in Paris vibes suggests hiring a moped, we do just that, a zippy electric thing with an impatient throttle.

As my wife clings behind me shouting directions, we weave through traffic to Canal St-Martin with its hipster cafes, and then to the Promenade Plantée, a disused viaduct and the precursor to New York’s High Line, which stretches from Bastille to Bois de Vincennes, and offers an elevated view of the streets below.

We spend 15 minutes queueing for macaroons in Le Marais before wondering what we’re doing. We don’t even like macaroons. “We can say no to TikTok, right?” I plead. Instead, we cross the quaint Place des Vosges to join another line, this one at the cafe Carette for its famous chocolat chaud. The wait for an inside table is 30 minutes, and so we brave one outdoors. It is 2°C but, my phone taunts, feels like -1°C. My battery is on 15 per cent. The hot chocolate costs €12 ($20).

Thanks to social media, there are queues everywhere. Instagram dictates that you cannot just eat a croissant here, you have to photograph it. Some businesses encourage this, others not so much. In the queue for Shakespeare and Company, the celebrated bookshop, I am scolded for trying to take a photograph of the sign that reads “No Photographs”.

“Mais, le Telegraph!” I say, to no avail.

La Maison Rose, famous for appearing in cult film Amelie.Credit: iStock

It is because of the queues that we rise stupidly early on Sunday in order to avoid them, making our way back to Abbesses, and to one of the more inexplicable TikTok-friendly destinations: an “old-fashioned” photo booth. On an otherwise unremarkable street a few feet from where the 2001 movie Amélie was filmed, youthful Italians, Germans and Japanese – each boasting smartphones with impressive cameras – are waiting to have their pictures taken like folk did in olden times.

My question of “why?” is presumed rhetorical; no one answers. When we finally take our turn in the claustrophobic cubicle, we prove hapless in the way only middle-aged people can be. My wife says that she can’t read how to pay by phone. The print is too small; she can’t find her glasses. Consequently, the first time the flash goes off, it catches us unawares. When minutes later we stumble out giggling with embarrassment, the young people gaze at us askance.

It’s only when we’re back on the Eurostar that I realise TikTok didn’t send us to the usual suspects, not even the Eiffel Tower. No matter; I’ve seen it before. But it did lead me to places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, off the beaten track, down serpentine alleyways, to a lovely hotel, and a truly fabulous place for sandwiches.

The city, it seems, is in safe hands with its #Influencers.

The writer travelled to Paris by Eurostar, and was a guest at La Fantaisie.