If it's your first time to London and you are feeling a little bit nervous don't worry I'm gonna tell you about the common problems and mistakes that people run into during their first few days here so that you don't make them yourself! And I asked some of our community members in the 'Local Guide to London's' Facebook group what they ran into when they first came to London, so they've helped me out with some of these answers. The first one comes from Geneva, who said: "I tried to see so much in six days that I spent a lot of time going from one end of London to the other in one day... spending a lot of time on the tube or buses, instead of appropriately planning my days around the area I was in or nearby." Geneva this is very common don't worry a lot of people do this! When you're planning out your itinerary for a day and you want to get between each of the things you want to do and see, use the 'Citymapper' app or you could use 'Google Maps' as well, to figure out how long is gonna take you to get in between each of the things you want to do. Also, make sure that you adjust for the time that you're going to be travelling, because it will likely take you longer during rush hour, so just adjust that in the map so it can give you a bit more of an accurate timing.
The absolute best way to make sure you're not spending a lot of time on public transportation each day in London is to pick one or two close by areas to explore. That way you can just walk to each of them and do your exploring that way, instead of having to hop on the tube or on a bus and spend loads of time on that every day. The next tip comes from John who said: "Our biggest mistake by far was not pacing ourselves. On one hand, we saw a ton of sights.
However, we were exhausted by the time we hit Paris.
Pace yourselves, London ain't going anywhere!" I'm always telling you guys not to over plan your visit here. I get it there's so many amazing things you want to make sure you do and see and you only have a limited amount of time, but i'm telling you if you're dealing with jetlag, if you're on public transportation all the time, that's gonna wear you out if you're doing lots of miles of walking you're gonna be really tired and that's not gonna be so enjoyable don't forget this is your vacation and you want to have a good time and be relaxed and not exhausted. Another reason i say not to over plan is you want to make sure you leave time for things that you discover once you arrive. You might be walking around, one day and see a museum that you'd actually like to spend a couple of hours in or a shop that you want to go check out... but if you've over planned your visit and you have to get from place to place pretty quickly, you won't have any time to find these little hidden gems that you've discovered along the way and in my opinion those are some of the best parts of London! So give yourself a chance to experience some of these great moments.
By the way, this video is part of my three days in London series which will help you to have a great first 72 hours in London and it's to celebrate my new "Three days in London Itinerary", I'll tell you more about that towards the end of the video! Okay Rob said: "For me a planned activity on the first day was a mistake. After a red eye flight in economy and a 7 am arrival at Heathrow, it was a bit rough. Better to just explore the first day and play it by ear.
That's a great tip Rob and a really good point! So if you're gonna be flying internationally across a few time zones and landing early in the morning at the airport, give yourself a break, don't have anything crazy planned for the day, you do want to do things so that you motivate yourself to stay awake so you can get on london time, however don't plan anything that you would be really upset that you didn't really enjoy because you were just so tired. This city can be super overwhelming when you first get here and i think a lot of times that people, when they come to visit, get a little uncomfortable and they stick to things that they know so if they see like familiar restaurants or clothing brands, shops or stuff like that they end up only visiting and checking out those things as opposed to exploring beyond and seeing what london really has to offer. Especially if you're, gonna be in very "touristy" areas like: Liccadilly circus, Leicester square, Trafalgar square, do your research ahead of time so that you know some really good places to eat, to have a drink or if you want to do any kind of attractions around there.
On that note if you're trying to find a good place to eat or to drink in one of these areas I don't recommend relying on the trip advisor app. Sometimes it can be helpful and i know it's easy to go to when you're in a pinch but I've had a look there and there are some really amazing food spots around these areas that don't even crack the top 20 and there are some places that don't really look nice at all that do and are frequented a lot by tourists because just they're high up on trip advisor know that trip advisor the algorithms can be skewed it can be easily manipulated I mean I read an article the other day, about a woman who faked a restaurant in her shed in london and was able to get it to the number one spot for restaurants in london that people were calling her up asking to make reservations. My point is is that you'll miss out on some amazing hidden gems here if you only stick with trip advisor recommendations.
So do your research, see if you can get some recommendations from local londoners who actually know good food spots around the area because they know the area really well and they live here, and yeah don't get stuck in a tripadvisor trap. If you're like: "Jess I feel so overwhelmed with trying to plan my first few days in london, oh my god, help me!", then you need to have a look at my '3 day london' itinerary, it's a flexible non overwhelming plan for your first three days here. It combines some of the top things to do and see in london with a bunch of really great local hidden gem recommendations.
In a feedback survey, one of my itinerary users said: "I really liked how detailed the itinerary is, it's full of so much information, I can't wait to use it for my trip to london" in june 2018. Thank you so much and if you want to find out more about my '3 day london' itinerary you can click the card that's popping up here or the link down in the description. This video is part of a four part '3 days in london' series that will help you with your first few days in london. To watch another video in this series click one of the videos that are popping up over here.