My Experience on a Seine River Cruise

One of the more popular things to do in Paris is a Seine River cruise. It’s actually a really good deal for a tourist activity in a major city, usually under $20 USD. Some come with snacks for a few dollars more, but the most basic ones just include a boat ticket and a tour guide.

For my first day in Paris, I figured a cruise down the river would be a good way to see some of the sights without having to deal with crowds– and I was right!

I booked a 1 hour Seine River cruise with Vedettes du Pont Neuf and scheduled it so I could still get back to my hostel before dark. They do have a nice evening cruise as well, if you don’t mind staying out at night, and a dinner cruise with a proper meal and everything.

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Seine River Cruise Quick Facts

• Departs from: Pont Neuf, Île de la Cité
• Hours: 10:30am-10:30pm, departs every 30 minutes
• Transit Connections
  • RER: Châtelet or St-Michel
  • Metro: Pont Neuf (M7), Louvre (M1) or Cité (M4)

Book your Seine River cruise here at Viator!

Tour Guide and Boat

Our guide spoke in English and French, alternating languages while he explained all the major viewpoints from the small part of the Seine we traveled on.

Basically, the boat does a big loop from Pont Neuf down to the Eiffel Tower and back up. It was fun to see big tourist spots from a different viewpoint than you’d normally get just going on the ground.

The boat was a basic tourist-y riverboat, not fancy but not totally worn down and gross, either. There’s no snack bar onboard but there’s a stall at the port so you can grab something (including wine!) before boarding if you’d like.

Tour Itinerary

Here’s all the places we saw, plus some pictures from the boat. Please note that a good chunk of it is bridges, because Paris has 37 bridges going across the Seine. Nine bridges are highlighted in this tour!

I managed to get a decent seat at the front of the boat, and the upper deck has few obstructions, so the didn’t come out too badly. However, the viewpoint of the actual buildings was sometimes blocked by, well, other buildings, or even bridges, so getting more than a glimpse was sometimes impossible.

Also, no offense to bridge lovers, but most of the bridges themselves looked VERY similar and weren’t really worth taking photos of tbh. Just something to keep in mind.

We cruised past the following places along the Seine River:

Louvre Museum

Orsay Museum

Alexander the 3rd Bridge

Invalides Hotel & Bridge

Eiffel Tower

Notre Dame Cathedral

Other Places (no photos)

• The Royal Bridge
• Concorde Bridge
• Modern Alma Bridge
• Tokyo Palace & Flame of Liberty
• American Church
• Grand Palace
• Place de la Concorde
• Legion of Honor Palace
• Voltaire Bank
• Arts Footbridge & French Institute
• City Island & New Bridge
• Orfevres Bank
• Saint-Michel Bridge
• Tournelle Bridge & Sainte Genevieve Statue
• Arabian World Institute & Saint-Bernard Bank
• Saint-Louis Island
• Mary Bridge & City Hall
• Hotel-Dieu & The Clock Tower
• Conciergerie

Book your Seine River cruise here at Viator!

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really enjoyed this cruise and liked looking at historical buildings from the point of view of the river. Our tour guide was excellent and I learned a good deal of history about the city and how it developed. While there were quite a few obstructions for the more famous buildings, it was still nice to get a sense of how everything was laid out along the river and I used that info for my sightseeing later on.

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