City Passes

I do not know about the other cities, but the London Pass is rarely worth it. This is because most of the museums in London are free. However, because we wanted to take our young teenage daughters to Tower Bridge, The Tower of London, Saint Paul's, Hampton Court and other places in and around London that do charge we bought it and it, worked well for us. We saved some money, and it did save us the line at Tower of London. We bought the Paris Pass as well. That I think will usually pay for itself especially if you visit Versailles and the line savings alone is probably worth a several euro premium. The lines for The Louvre, The d'Orsay, and Louvre were enormous and bypassing them was terrific. It will not avoid the Notre Dame line. We saved quite a bit with it. The best thing to do is look at the web sites for each pass and add up the cost of the things you realistically think you would do within the time limit for the pass. Assume you won't do quite as much as you think you will. If the pass will save you money by that calculation, get it. Otherwise don't.

In Berlin you can get a three-day museum pass for 19 euros that is valid at public sector and some private museums, and which is much better value than the more promoted passes.

Be careful for Paris. There are several similar sounding, yet different, passes, such as the Paris Museum Pass, the Paris Visite Pass, and the Paris Pass. The Museum Pass can be a good deal, but is not always (contrary to what Rick says). The other two rarely are. Jenny, above, seems to have gotten a Paris Museum Pass, which would indeed have worked well for her situation. As for other cities, there is no consistency. You have to go to the official website for the pass (not a reseller, who will charge extra), figure out the cost for the pass per day, and then see if the things you are seeing will make it worthwhile. A common "rip-off" aspect of the passes is that they will include transit for all zones, when you only need transit in the central area (a particular problem with London and Paris passes). A transit pass alone, for the zones you need, is the way to go. On the other hand, in many other places, a city pass including transit is not much more than a transit pass alone, so your admissions are gravy. The Oslo Card is one I remember being a very good deal. It cost $50 for 3 days, but I used $75 worth of services. And Stockholm and Copenhagen had similar good deals. But Rick Steves himself takes pains to emphasize that the card for Bergen is becoming more of a rip-off every year. For Amsterdam, there is a Museum Pass that is a very good deal, as it's good for the whole country for one year. The iAmsterdam cards, on the other hand, are very hard to make pay off.

Harald is right. It is the Paris Museum Pass that we got. There is a version of the London Pass that includes transportation too which is even more unlikely to be a good deal. Honestly the only pass that includes transport, that I know of, that is a good deal is the Roma Pass. But that one you already know about.

Jenny, the Stockholm and Oslo Cards include transport, as did my Strasbourg pass, my Padova Card, my Grenada pass...And for Copenhagen, the Copenhagen Card not only includes transit within the city, but the entire region (including Roskilde, Helsingor, and Hillerod). At least, it did in 1991, when I used it. This made it a phenomenal deal. In other words, many passes do include transit, and that can sometimes be good. But in Paris and London, with their zone systems, beware of spending a lot of money to get transit for outlying zones that you will only visit once or twice on your trip (to get to the airport, Versailles, etc). For Budapest (to take one example), the transit pass was a good deal, but the Budapest Card was not.

Researching up coming Paris trip, The Paris Pass which pops up first on Google is EU176 for six days. The Paris Museum Pass is EU69 for 6 days. The Paris Visite transport z1-3 is EU31.15 for 5 days plus 9.75 for 1 day. So that comes to EU 109.90. What do you get for the extra EU66 for the Paris Pass? Discounts on attractions you're not interested in and commission for the sales agent.

Just for the record, we found the Salzburg Pass to be one of the best values we've come across. It included transportation and many attractions...monuments, a river boat ride, a brewery and lots more. It was available for one,two,or three days as I recall. We used it to plan our daily activities and it was great for us.

FYI, keep an eye out for online deals when buying city passes. The London Pass does have occasional discounts (none of which made it worth my while, unfortunately). The York Pass had a new version that went on sale back on April 1 of this year, and they offered a 10% discount if you bought it that first week of April, which I did. I did end up regretting getting it just because I was unexpectedly exhausted by the time we got to York, so only saw a few places while we were there and ended up not getting my money's worth out of it, even with the discount. That's a factor to keep in mind if you're thinking about getting passes!