Is it better to purchase museum cards for each city or the museum card that covers the whole country. We will be visiting Bruges, Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent, as well as some battlefield sites over 10 days. Thank you.
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Washington DC
30502 posts
The only way to answer this question is to make a list of the places you are sure you will go--and perhaps an extra list of secondary targets you hope to have time for--and add up their entry fees so you can compare that total to the cost of the museum card(s).
Just paying individually for each place you go often turns out to be less expensive. It's hard to project how much time you'll want to spend at each stop, which depends on your level of interest. A sightseeing card works better from the financial standpoint if you plan a lot of quick visits rather than in-depth exploration of a few places.
Going to the battlefield sites is going to mean considerable travel time, which is time you will not be using any sightseeing card. The same is true for the time spent on trains and going back and forth between lodging place and train station. In addition, Brussels is a large enough city that you need to take a look at a map to see where your sights of interest are located. Public transportation is excellent there, but that doesn't mean it's always quick to get from Sight A to Sight B.
If the national pass you are thinking about is the Belgium Museum Pass, I'm sorry to tell you that--unless the situation has changed since last year--it is not available to foreign travelers. It would save tourists a fortune, but we're not permitted to buy it.
I used the local pass in Bruges last year, and it worked fine for me. The sights in Bruges are rather small, not the sort of places where you'd typically spend a lot of hours at one sightseeing stop.
Just for future reference, there are annual passes available in some other parts of Europe that are not limited to local residents. I have bought them and used them in Finland, Estonia, and the Lombardy (Milan), Trentino-Alto Adige and Campania (Naples) areas of Italy. I'm a slow traveler who spends a lot of time at almost every place I go, so it's usually easy for me to make an annual card pay off. I find the short validity periods of a lot of city cards very annoying to deal with; I don't like rushing.