Everyone does eight nights in Europe. Almost nobody sequences them right.

Charles de Gaulle's Terminal 2 is large and immigration moves slowly; allow ninety minutes from touchdown to the exit. The tour manager meets you there and the coach goes in on the Périphérique ring road, so you pass under the Arc de Triomphe's line of sight before you reach the hotel. If the flight lands before four, there is time for a slow walk down the Champs-Élysées — the stretch from the Arc to Place de la Concorde is 1.9 kilometres and entirely flat. Dinner is Indian, in La Chapelle near Gare du Nord, where several north Indian kitchens serve thali with rotis you can actually recognise.

Skip the hotel buffet tonight. You are here for a week; do not eat a croissant you could eat at home.

The lift to the Eiffel Tower's second floor runs 120 metres and the view covers the city in every direction. Book the timed slot before you leave India; the walk-up queue in July runs to three hours and the last entry is at dusk. The morning coach tour covers Place de la Concorde, Les Invalides' gold dome, the Opéra Garnier and the rebuilt Notre-Dame — whose exterior is now restored, though the interior reopened to visitors only in late 2024. The afternoon is a Bateaux cruise down the Seine past the Musée d'Orsay and the Île de la Cité, which is the most relaxed forty-five minutes in Paris.

Skip: the tourist trap boats that blast pop music. The quiet Bateaux cruise is the one worth the ticket.

The Louvre has 35,000 objects across fifteen kilometres of corridor; the right answer is to see twenty things well, not two hundred badly. Booked entry skips the pyramid queue. Start in the Denon wing on the ground floor — the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa. That is two hours. Families with children usually swap the entire day for Disneyland Paris, which is forty minutes east on the RER A; we book that separately. The afternoon goes to Montmartre: the white dome of Sacré-Cœur, the artists' square at Place du Tertre, and a stop at Galeries Lafayette for the 1912 stained-glass dome, which is free to enter.

One thing most people miss: the Eiffel Tower is best photographed from the Trocadéro esplanade, not from underneath it. If you want a professional shot in front of it, book the Eiffel Tower photo session in the morning when the light is in front of the tower.

The coach runs east through Burgundy and the Jura hills into central Switzerland — roughly eight hours including stops, so it is a travel day. Lucerne arrives by late afternoon. The Kapellbrücke is a covered wooden footbridge from 1333, the oldest surviving in Europe, with triangular painted panels in its roof beams telling canton and city history. Walk it slowly in both directions; the Reuss river below is green and the mountains behind the lake are white. The Lion Monument is ten minutes away on foot — a dying lion carved into a limestone cliff in 1821 to mark the Swiss Guards who died in Paris in 1792. Mark Twain called it the most mournful piece of stone in the world, which is accurate.

A walking and boat tour run by a local guide — covering the Kapellbrücke, the old town walls and an hour on the lake — is the most efficient way to do Lucerne if you arrive with only an afternoon.

Up from Engelberg village in three stages. The last cabin is the Rotair — the world's first revolving gondola, which rotates 360 degrees as it climbs the final section of glacier to 3,020 metres. At the top: the Glacier Grotto, a tunnel cut into the ice with walls you can touch, the Cliff Walk suspension bridge across the north face, and the Ice Flyer open chairlift over crevasses. Take real gloves and a proper jacket; the summit temperature in July is typically minus two to minus five Celsius, and the flip-flop count among Indian tourists arriving unprepared is notable. The Lucerne cable car and lake cruise combination on Mount Pilatus is an alternative for anyone who has already done Titlis.

Skip: the overpriced meals at the summit restaurants. Carry something from below; the view from the terrace is the same whether you eat there or not.

The Lucerne to Milan train goes through the Gotthard base tunnel — 57 kilometres of the longest rail tunnel on earth, completed in 2016 — and comes out into the Italian lake district. From Milan the coach continues east; by early afternoon you are on the causeway into Venice. A private water taxi takes the group across the lagoon to St Mark's Square. The Doge's Palace façade, the Bridge of Sighs, a glass-blowing demonstration by a Murano glassmaster — these are the bones of the afternoon. You sleep on the mainland at Mestre, where the hotels cost a third of what they cost on the island and the water taxi is a twelve-minute ride.

The electric boat tour through Venice's back canals is the one thing to add if you have a free evening; the hidden channels have none of the traffic of the Grand Canal.

South on the A1 autostrada with a two-hour halt in Florence. The right use of two hours is Piazzale Michelangelo — the terrace above the city with a direct line of sight across the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio and the Arno — followed by a walk down to Ponte Vecchio, the only medieval bridge in Florence with goldsmiths' shops still trading on it. Do not attempt the Uffizi or the Accademia on a two-hour stop; they each need half a day. Add Florence if you have eleven or twelve nights. Rome by evening; dinner is Indian, on Via Principe Amedeo near Termini station, where two or three restaurants know exactly what a Gujarati family needs after seven days of European eating.

The Welcome to Rome experience — a one-hour orientation covering 2,700 years in a single walk — is worth doing tonight if legs allow, because it makes tomorrow's Colosseum and Vatican visit make sense.

This is the day most people under-plan. The Colosseum held 50,000 people in AD 80 and the hypogeum — the underground passages where animals and gladiators were staged — was opened to visitors only recently; a guided tour gets you in. The Roman Forum directly next door is the actual ground of the Roman Republic, still being excavated. After lunch, the Vatican Museums: three kilometres of papal collections before the Sistine Chapel, then St Peter's Basilica. Walk-up queues for both the Colosseum and the Vatican run to four hours in summer; the full-day guided tour with timed entry to both is the honest answer. The Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps are fifteen minutes from the hotel by foot; go at nine in the evening when the crowd is half the afternoon size.

Skip: the tours that promise the Vatican and Colosseum in three hours. They do the exteriors quickly and the interiors in ten minutes each. Four hours minimum for the Vatican alone.

Allow three hours at the airport. The VAT refund desk in Terminal 3 is the slowest queue in Italian bureaucracy: you must present the goods, the original receipts and the tax-free forms together, all before you check the bags. If the forms were not stamped at the shop, customs can stamp them at the airport but only before check-in. The tour manager stays with the group through the final security queue.

One thing to declare at Indian customs: wood carvings, genuine leather goods and any food item from Europe. Keep all receipts; the declaration is straightforward if the paperwork is in order.