Everyone asks… Are city passes good value?

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This was published 9 years ago

Everyone asks… Are city passes good value?

By Michael Gebicki
Night tour: A queue outside the Louvre museum in Paris.

Night tour: A queue outside the Louvre museum in Paris.Credit: AFP

Some are, others almost certainly not. In Paris, for example, you would need to visit the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, Musee d’Orsay, Notre Dame, the Pompidou Centre and the Rodin Museum to come close to getting your money’s worth out of the two-day, €117 ($170) Paris Pass, and that’s impossible.

On the other hand, the two-day Paris Museum Pass at €42 ($61) gives you free entry to all the above, minus a few frilly extras that the Paris Pass provides, and that is almost certainly worth the money. Deciding whether to go with a city pass involves working out what you want to visit and how much it’s going to cost.

For example a three-day adult London Pass costs £81 ($148). Adult admission to the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle averages around £20 ($37) each and if you can pack at least five such top-drawer attractions into three days, you’re on a winner.

However admission to many of London’s most illustrious museums and galleries including The British Museum, The Science Museum and the Tate Modern is free.

One persuasive argument in favour of city passes is that they allow you to bypass ticket queues. At the peak of summer, you can easily spend close to two hours waiting to buy a ticket to The Louvre. With a Paris Museum Pass in hand, you can skip straight to the front, and that makes it worth its weight in gold.

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