3 questions come up in almost every conversation I have with first-time visitors:

Will I accidentally offend someone?
What if I don’t speak French?
What if I can't find good spots and end up at tourist traps?

These are real, fair questions, the kind that come from someone who actually cares about doing this trip well. So let me answer them honestly, with what I see in Paris every day, and what I learned from my own first trips abroad.

"Will I accidentally offend someone?"

You probably will, a little, and that is completely fine!

French politeness has its codes, for example:

You greet shopkeepers when you walk in.
You wait to be seated at a restaurant.
You don’t expect the waiter to come check on you every five minutes, because here a long meal is the whole point of going to a restaurant, the time at the table is part of the meal.

You won’t know all of this on day one, and you will get a few things slightly wrong. So will every other tourist who lands in Paris that morning. The city sees something like 50 million international visitors a year, and small cultural mismatches happen all day, every day. Honestly, that is just part of traveling.

Parisians are used to it. Most of them are simply busy with their own lives, on their way to work or to pick up a kid, they are really not waiting to catch you out. As long as you make a visible effort to be respectful, the vast majority will meet you halfway, and often they will be warmer than you expected.

So spend 10 minutes reading a short guide on the basics of Parisian etiquette (greetings, restaurants, public space), and then please, put the topic down. You will pick up the rest by watching how people behave around you, and the small mistakes you make along the way will become part of your stories later. Honestly, the only real risk is being so afraid of doing something wrong that you stop talking to people altogether. That is the trip you don’t want.

"What if I don't speak French?"

You don’t need to! I see this anxiety in almost every traveler I meet, and I really want to put it to rest.

Paris is not built on the assumption that visitors are fluent. Restaurant staff deal with English-speaking guests all day. Hotels speak English, museum guides speak English, most restaurants in central Paris have English menus, and where they don’t, your phone camera plus a translation app will read the menu in three seconds. You will meet some Parisians whose English is rough (often with a thick French accent ;) ), there will be moments of confusion, you will use your hands, you will laugh about a misunderstanding, and you will figure it out. That is just part of being abroad.

What really matters, and this is the part I want you to take with you, is the effort. Parisians appreciate effort, even imperfect effort. A “Bonjour” with a smile, even with an awful accent, completely changes the temperature of an interaction. I have watched this happen thousands of times. A tourist who walks into a shop and starts speaking English directly gets a cold opening. A tourist who says “Bonjour”, tries one French word, then switches to English, almost always gets a warmer welcome.

So learn three words. Five minutes, and it changes your whole trip.

First, “Bonjour”, before any interaction. Before ordering coffee, before asking a question, before anything. Say it every time, to everyone.
Second, “Merci”, whenever someone helps you, brings your food, gives you directions.
Third, “Au revoir” when you leave. This last one is harder to pronounce, so if you stumble, don’t stress, just try.

These 3 words signal that you respect the place you are visiting, and once you have signaled respect, almost everything else is forgivable.

"What if I can't find good spots and end up at tourist traps?"

Tourist traps exist in Paris, that is true. Restaurants with photo menus in six languages, aggressive hosts pulling people in from the sidewalk, prices that don’t match the plate. So your worry is legitimate, you are not making it up.

But here is something most visitors don’t expect, a lot of crowded places in Paris are crowded because they are actually good. A crowd is not automatically a trap. The Eiffel Tower neighborhood has traps, and it also has excellent neighborhood bistros where locals eat lunch every day. The Latin Quarter has traps, and it has restaurants that have been serving lovely food for decades. So avoiding tourist areas altogether would cut you off from half of Paris. What you actually need is the ability to spot quality inside them.

Good news, you have a built-in shortcut. Parisians are picky about food, almost annoyingly so, and if a place is consistently bad, locals stop going. So if Parisians are still eating somewhere, the place is at the very least correct. That is your filter.

Concretely, before you sit down anywhere, open Google reviews on your phone and read 15 to 20 recent ones. Not the star rating, the actual text. Check if at least one of the positive reviews looks like it was written by a French person, you can tell by the name, by the use of specific French dish names, by the way they compare the place to other spots in the neighborhood instead of writing “amazing food, great atmosphere”. When a Parisian recommends a restaurant, they are comparing it to dozens of other restaurants within walking distance of their home, so their bar is much higher than a one-week visitor’s bar. If they are still recommending it, that is a real signal.

And if doing this every meal sounds exhausting, that is exactly why I built Paris on the Spot app. I have done the testing and the filtering for you, organized by where you actually are in the city. Near the Louvre, finishing up at the Eiffel Tower, somewhere in the Marais, you open the app, you get solid options, and you decide.

Bref, these 3 worries are a good sign, they tell me you care about doing this trip well. You will mispronounce a few words. You might pick one disappointing restaurant. You will make a small cultural slip somewhere on day two and only realize it on day five, and that will become a story you tell later. All of that is the real texture of a first trip, and honestly, it is what makes Paris feel like Paris instead of a checklist!

If you are someone who likes to land already prepared, the etiquette guide and the 3 magic words are enough to start. If you would rather skip the research and let someone hand you good options once you are on the ground, that is exactly what my app is for. Either way, please come, and please relax a little, you are going to be fine.

PS: if this was helpful, you might also like the article on why planning Paris feels overwhelming, and the one on why you don’t need to see everything to feel like you have truly seen Paris.