See Paris Easily: Our Tootbus Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour Experience & Recommendation

Planning your trip to Paris and looking for a quick and easy way to see the highlights? We highly recommend the Tootbus Hop-on Hop-off Bus Tour in Paris! It’s one of the many activities to do in Paris that we love and personally recommend. Anytime we visit a new city that offers a hop-on hop-off bus tour we like doing it on the first day of our trip. It gives us a chance to easily and quickly see all the highlights of the city while learning about it via their audio guide, and then we can decide which areas we’d like to spend more time exploring.

There are two companies that offer this type of bus tour in Paris, and we recently spent a few hours exploring our own city with the Tootbus company on their Paris Discovery Tour. Ready to explore Paris the easy way? Click here to see the different Tootbus Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tours available and book your Parisian adventure! Read on to hear more about our experience on this Paris hop on hop off bus tour and to see all the photos we captured from the comfort of our seats on the top deck! All photos were taken with an iPhone 🙂 *these are affiliate links and we may receive a small commission if you book

First, the cliffnotes and things we look for on a bus tour that Tootbus had:

• Operates on schedule: The hop on hop off bus in Paris with Tootbus is scheduled for approximately every 10 minutes and it was pretty accurate. This reliability is crucial when you’re trying to maximize your limited time in Paris.
• Bus is clean & comfortable: We found the Tootbus Paris sightseeing buses to be clean and comfortable. Bonus points for being 100% electric so no exhaust fumes to deal with when stationary.
• Audio guide: The Paris bus tour offers an audio guide & you can get disposable headphones on the bus to plug in and listen, or you can plug in your own set. The provided headphones were very comfortable and the audio was easy to hear. Available in these languages:  English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Brazilian, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.
• Duration: entire route is about 2 hours if you don’t get off at all, so doesn’t take too much time for those with short attention spans or don’t like sitting still for too long 🙂
• Ease of use: The Tootbus app enhances the Paris hop on hop off experience. You can download to your phone to track buses, play the audio guides as you wish, and has additional walking tour routes with accompanying audio guides. You can purchase tickets via the app as well. Another nice thing we noticed – since this company is a branch of the Paris public transit system, almost all the stops were next to a public bus stop. So if you’re using public transportation you can easily use it to get to a Tootbus stop, or you can get off the Tootbus and easily get on a public bus to go to another part of town.
• Is it family friendly:  If you are traveling with children, they have a child friendly channel available in French and English that will keep the little ones entertained!
• Points of Attraction: As locals, we think the Discovery route effectively covers many of the must-see attractions in Paris. This route does not pass through Montmartre/Sacré Coeur, but that area is covered by their nighttime route so you can see the Moulin Rouge all lit up. Major highlights of Paris you’ll pass by:
  • Opera
  • Louvre Museum
  • Notre-Dame Cathedral
  • Sainte-Chapelle
  • Orsay Museum
  • Place de la Concorde
  • Champs-Elysées
  • Arc de Triomphe
  • Eiffel Tower
  • Les Invalides
  • Grand Palais
  • and many more! Click below to book your tour!

Enjoy the photos and scroll to the bottom for the final summary and a photo showing all the prices & options for this hop-on hop-off Paris bus tour!

Questions you may be wondering now:

• Is it worth the money? Yes, absolutely! Unless of course it’s raining 🙂 The view from the interior of the lower deck is decent, but you take this Paris bus tour for the upper deck view.
• How does it compare to other ways of seeing Paris & getting around, such as public bus, metro, etc? The metro is definitely faster, but you see nothing of Paris. A public bus will be slightly faster due to the longer stops of the tour bus, but the view isn’t even comparable.
• How long should we expect to spend on the bus? As mentioned earlier, from start to finish the entire route will take about 2 hours. You can start your tour at any of the stops and your ticket is valid for 24 hrs upon first validation. Once you’ve seen Paris from the bus, simply use it to get to your new favorite Parisian spots for the next 22 hours!