Good day
I am looking at purchasing this for our trip and have a simple question. Does the 72 hours begin at first usage. I assume so , but there is no printed info on website addressing this. Thanks as always
Mike
DC
Posted by
2359 posts
How does the Berlin Welcome Card work?
The card is valid for 48 or 72 hours from the moment it is used for the first time (validation).
Posted by
Washington DC
27137 posts
Be sure you'll benefit from that card. I struggled mightily to make it pay off for me in 2015. There were several issues:
Although the card is perfectly legit, it doesn't cover all the places I wanted to go in Berlin, so I had to either organize my sightseeing logically (geographically), effectively wasting card-covered time while I went to sights I had to pay to enter or that were free, or I had to organize my sightseeing into covered and non-covered sights. Doing the latter would have had me wasting time as I visited the same neighborhood twice, once to go to a covered sight and again (later) to go to a non-covered sight.
Berlin's sights are quite spread out. The time you spend traveling between sights can seriously cut into your sightseeing time. If the card still covers local transportation, don't over-value that feature. You can buy just-transportation passes relatively cheaply; do check to see what time periods are offered, because they may not align well with the length of your stay in Berlin. There may be days when you don't use much transportation (e.g., a day you spend entirely on Museumsinseln), in which case you could just use two transportation tickets (or none if your hotel is within walking distance of Museumsinseln) rather than buying a pass that covers that day.
I hope this has been fixed by now, but I was really infuriated in 2015 when I stood in a long line at one of the Museumsinseln museums and then was told I couldn't use my Berlin Welcome Card at all because there was a special exhibition running. The usual procedure (in other cities) in that situation is to charge the visitor the fee just for the special exhibition, but that's not the way they handled it for me. That was a full afternoon of my BWC validity period wasted.
I believe there's a card that covers just the Museumsinseln sights, which I understand doesn't have the special exhibition gotcha (though I haven't verified that). That card would have been better for me.