Temporary / Permanent Collects at the Louvre

I am surprised that this keeps coming up. The ticket admits you to the permanent exhibits, so after leaving the temporary exhibit area on the first floor you just head for the wing you want to enter and show your ticket. All of this is well past the security check points. It is not complicated and you won't have any trouble finding the entry points when you are actually there. There are 3 wings and usually one exits and enters each separately and with current ticket policies you only get one entry per wing. In the past you could get from one wing to another without going through the wing entrance, but I am not sure that is still true with their newer less patron friendly policies.

Judging by your first comment, I suspect that this may have been covered previously here on the board, however it didn't come up when I did a search for information on the such, hence the question. Your input was reassuring and helpful. Thank you much.

If I may jump in with a similar question:

We have 9:30am tix for the Davinci exhibit. Upon entering, are you shuttled immediately to the Davinci exhibit? Because we would like to try and enter at 9am, see Mona Lisa first before the crowds, and then do Davinci. Is this possible? I have read that you can enter a little early, but just wondering if, with Davinci tix, if we can sidestep to Mona Lisa first. Thanks :)

If you arrive at opening time, RUN, don't walk, to the Mona Lisa. Not kidding. If you get to the Mona Lisa later than 30 minutes after opening time, you will be in a gallery with 400 other people, all maneuvering to see a very small picture on the wall

doughnut -- I would run not walk to the daVinci line. Your 9:30 ticket will not admit you at 9:30 if our experience is an indicator. We did the Vermeer exhibit a couple of years ago and had 10 am ticket -- we got in line at 9:30 and the wait was 90 minutes from that point to get into the exhibit. If we had gotten in line at 10 I suspect it would have been two hours to get in as the crowds built. We asked a guard when we arrived at 9:30 and he urged us to get in line 'right now' and he was right. Maybe they have better crowd estimation/control now but I doubt it. We had several timed tickets for exhibits last spring in Paris including at the Grand Palais and at the King Tut exhibit at Villette and all of them required a wait of at least half an hour in line before we actually entered the exhibit and King Tut was about 45 minutes. You will not get entry to the exhibit at 9:30. Although having an early in the day ticket should mean better odds than one later in the day as the exhibit fills up.

When we were there one elderly person collapsed after standing in line for over an hour and was carted off on a stretcher and several people left the line.

FYI even the Louvre ticket website is backed up now. We've been an online queue just to access the tickets I reserved a couple of weeks ago in order to print them out.
So DOWNLOAD your Tix onto your phone or print them out well in advance of getting in line.

Result: printed now but it took 20 minutes to wait for website access. It's much easier to access the website during the evening from the States,
Tickets are being gobbled up at an astonishing speed. Are ticket resellers adding to the demand?

I went to the DaVinci exhibit today. I had a 9:30 time. You line up separately from other ticketholders into 2 lines that have dark blue carpet runners saying Léonardo DaVinci right in front of the center of the pyramid. They had the 9A group in a separate slot and they were allowed in at 9A. We were allowed in to the Pyramid at about 9:28. I was chatting with the guy next to me who is seeing the exhibition for each of the 5 days he is here. He said yesterday (opening day) the security folks let the whole line in about 15 minutes early. It depends on the particular security team you have as to whether they will let you in early. The ones today were very strict. They did shoo us to the center doors where we then filed in with the other ticketholders for the security screen. Who knows how this will be after the exhibition is going for a while. Once you are thru the security you take the escalators down the the lobby area under the Pyramid with all other ticketholders. You then head to the Sully wing and you’ll see the sign for the Da Vinci exhibition.

I agree with Janet. Based on both the Vermeer exhibit last year and this one I’d go directly to the exhibition area. This was NOT as crowded as the day I did Vermeer but that may change. There was no line once I got to the special exhibition area and they were just scanning the tickets and letting everyone through.

By the way, I did go to Mona Lisa afterward mostly just to see how the refurbished room looked. I managed to work my way around from the Denon wing via the Sully wing to the Richelieu wing with just one entry scan at that point.

Be sure to keep your tickets in a sheet protector. The lady behind me when I went back in through the Sully entrance had had her ticket folded in her back pocket and some of the bar had rubbed off. She said she had had trouble getting into the Da Vinci exhibit and the lady scanning at the Sully entrance was not going to let her in but relented when she looked at the ticket. One of the others in their group was not admitted to the Da Vinci exhibit and was told to go reprint it. (?? Like how are you going to do that?) I looked at both tickets and they looked like mine, printed at home so my sense was they were not scamming.

I just waited in the online queue (about 20 mins) to buy February tickets for Leonardo and the official website appears to only open the dates in the next few months and not as far ahead as February but with no explanation. Does anyone know WHEN the February slots will open? I am flying from the states just to see this and don't want to miss it. I am unsure if this is a glitch in the program, an error on my part or whether others have encountered this situation.

Trisha--try tonight and see if it goes through. Please report back. The website was so overloaded today that I couldn't do anything either. Last night, I had no problem.

Edit: it's 6pm Eastern, midnight in Paris, and I was able not only to get into the website but also do a mock booking for February. Tickets are being sold.