Visiting Berlin WelcomeCard?

Berlin is a large city. You probably will need to use city transit from time to time, and quite likely more often than in many other cities since the sights are pretty well scattered. However, you can buy separate day passes (and probably also multi-day passes) for the transit system, so you don't have to go for a package deal. The more time you spend on transit, the less time you'll have to go inside museums and historical sights, and vice versa.

I bought the Welcome Card with the Museumsinseln add-on back in 2015. Although it might be right for you, I wouldn't do it again. These were the issues I had:

• One of the museums was having a special exhibition. As is common, there was an extra charge for it, not covered by the Welcome Card. That is typical. But in Berlin, rather than just paying the additional cost for the exhibition, I was required to pay the full entry fee, so I got no benefit from the card at that museum.

• I had to stand in the hour-long ticket line at the above museum.

• I was going to a lot of historic sights as well as museums, some of which weren't covered by the card but were located near covered sights. It would be more efficient to organize one's sightseeing plan geographically, but I was trying to get full value for the card, so there was some back-and-forth travel going on. In retrospect, I realized that my time was more valuable than the potential savings from the card.

• Berlin has some very large museums and time-consuming historic sights, so I spent more time in many places than I had anticipated, reducing the value of the free admissions offered by the card.

I hope they've fixed the first and second problems I've listed above.

Take a good look at your sightseeing list for Berlin and a city map. Be realistic about what you'll have time to see. Will there be enough fully covered by the card for it to pay off? That list includes a lot of the major museums in Berlin, but some major sights aren't on the list.

Note that the many sights that are discounted seem to only have a 25% or 30% discount, which isn't all that impressive and might not be worth the hassle of trying to hop from covered sight to covered sight rather than taking the geographically sensible approach when laying out a sightseeing route.

I was just in Berlin for 8 nights and it was great!!!! Enjoy!

Now, as to buying the card, make sure you review the sites that are offered as free or discounted on the card and make those are sites you want to see. We looked at the card but opted not to buy it because the card did not cover many of the things we wanted to do.

For my family, it was just 25.50 euros for unlimited travel per day (I had 4 kids in tow). As the other poster stated, Berlin is large and many sites are spread out. Therefore, you are right to be thinking about how to get around. Fortunately it is very organized and easy to get around.

I was just in Berlin and bought the regular Welcome Card for me the transport was worth it and I took 3 tours with Original Berlin Walks.