We are presently in the queue. I purchased tickets online and got a confirmation email where it said I could print the tickets. Tried to print them, including creating an account but nothing worked from the email I sent. Just went to ticket office and they told me there was nothing they could do just wait in the long entry line. Any advice would be appreciated as I dont want to get in and be turned away because I just have an email with the confirmation number.
This is something that should be sorted out well in advance.
From whom did you orginally purchase tickets? If it was a 3rd party, you contact them, not the Versailles staff. If you used the official Versailles website to purchase tickets and the terms of purchase required tickets to be printed in advance and you did not or could not, you are at their mercy as staff may have no procedure to process entry with only a confirmation number.
Queing in the ticket line probably also means paying again for entrance.
If the office couldn't/wouldn't help then you are about to buy new tickets. An email is not enough. We were able to download our tickets, but I went ahead and printed them as I am always nervous about tickets on phones -- we have used them a few times and sometimes have trouble getting them read.
Chalk this up to 'stupid tax' that we all pay from time to time. My current one is inadvertently signing up for one of those 'services' that gives you access to cheap tickets for an annual fee. My French being terrible, I didn't realize I was agreeing to that when I bought tickets for a performance. Now I will have to figure out how to cancel this without it slowly eating up my bank account with automatic withdrawals. You need to have tickets sorted before you get in line. We found a copy shop in Paris that was able to download our Versailles tickets on a data stick and print them for us. It is a fairly small cost for a mistake -- just grin and bear it.
Hope the ticket office can download your tickets for you at Versailles but 'it is impossible' is a French phrase unmistakable in French or English and a common part of the service vocabulary
This reminds me of when we wanted to go to Schonnbrunn Palace in Vienna. We wanted to wait until we were there and choose a day that was going to be the best weather since there was rain in the forecast for several of the days we were there. We asked the hotel concierge if he could take care of it for us. He basically set me up at an Apple computer in the lobby and told me to wait until he could come over and do it. Then he got busy with someone else and after sitting there for half an hour, I went ahead and started making the reservation on the website myself since I would be paying with my own credit card anyway. But I expected to be able to print the tickets out at the printer available there. When he finally came over to help me he was complaining about their printer giving them trouble and that he didn't know if he could get the tickets printed. He also put in his own email when he was helping me finish since his intention was to try to print the tickets. In the end, he couldn't do it so I told him to forward the transaction to me. Luckily, we were able to download the entrance code and use my phone to get in. I was pretty aggravated because I could have easily done this without his aid whatsoever, I was just wanting the paper copy as well. This was also an interesting experience because it was literally the only thing that we did that I had not made prior reservations for myself. So when we come to Paris in September, I am going to assume that if I buy the tickets with a designated time to enter Versailles from their website, I will be able to use my phone to show the code and get in?