Comments about long lines abound on many travel forums. Do RS readers have experiences with purchasing Skip-the-Line organized tours vs simply purchasing tickets ahead of time on the website for the Palace and other sites? RS has such great self-guided tour descriptions that I like following those in most cases, but visitors complain a lot about exceedingly long lines even when tickets are bought ahead of time.
thoughts?
I was at the Palacio Real just two days ago! It was beautiful and you will have a great time. We bought our tickets online a few days in advance and were able to go right in, which made it much easier. We did the guided tour offered on the Palacio Real's official website: https://www.patrimonionacional.es/en/visita/royal-palace-madrid
Make sure you use that link above as a lot of the top results on Google are for third party resellers. In general if you see the words "tickets" or "entradas" in the main part of the website address then it is probably not the official website.
We also purchased our Prado tickets online which made things easier. Of course, there will always be security queues but for both sites these were very short. This is the official site for the Prado: https://www.museodelprado.es/en
