Paris Without the Tourist Traps

Why this book exists

Most visitors never meet a pickpocket. The ones who do were never told what to watch for.

I was born in Paris, and for about thirty years I held the official guide license, guide-conférencier, walking visitors through our monuments almost every day. Most of them came from America, often after years of saving and planning.

I watched an American lose his wallet and passport at Châtelet in four seconds, and I could not reach him through the crowd. I sat in a police station with a couple from Ohio who lost a wallet to a clipboard "petition" near the Louvre, on the afternoon they had saved for the Musée d'Orsay. Nobody had ever told them what to look for.

This book is everything I told my groups before they needed it, written the way I would tell you across a café table. It is honest about the traps, but it is not a book about fear. The point of knowing the traps is so that you can stop thinking about them, keep your bag in front, and look up at the city.

From the pickpocket video

What the video couldn't fit

A ten-minute video gives you the ten habits. The book gives you the tools to use them on the platform:

• The One-Page Pickpocket Checklist to print and fold into your bag, read once each morning until it becomes habit.
• The lines and stations I watch most, line by line, with what to do at each one.
• The door strike zone, drawn out: where thefts happen in a carriage and where to stand instead.
• Every street scam on the famous squares: the clipboard, the bracelet, the gold ring, the shell game, the fake tickets, and the polite line that ends each one.
• If you're robbed: the ten-minute card, with the numbers to call, what to freeze first and where the US Embassy's passport entrance is.

The honest math

The book costs less than one bad hour in Paris

Official Paris taxis charge a fixed fare between the airports and the city. The book gives you the current fares, the official signs to follow, and the one sentence that ends every taxi tout's pitch.