Every great museum has a queue. The ticket decides how long yours is.
Which Vatican ticket clears the four-hour line. What the Louvre costs before the doors open. Whether the Uffizi needs a guide or just a timed slot. Reviews of the museum tours and tickets you can book today.
The Sistine ceiling, the Mona Lisa, the Tribuna: museum rooms people fly for.
Four bookings that anchor a first trip. What each ticket costs, what the queue is really like, and what the travellers who went say.
01Vatican Museums, RomeVatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance TicketEntry to the museums and the Sistine Chapel. Take the first slot of the morning; by ten the Gallery of Maps is shoulder to shoulder.
02The Louvre, ParisLouvre Museum Timed-Entrance TicketA timed-entrance ticket, which is the only kind the Louvre sells. Go in under the Carrousel and turn straight into the Denon wing.
03Van Gogh Museum, AmsterdamVan Gogh Museum TicketA date-and-time ticket for the largest Van Gogh collection anywhere. Nothing is sold at the door, so this is booked or not seen.
04Uffizi Gallery, FlorenceSkip-The-Line Uffizi Gallery Timed Entry TicketTimed entry to the Botticelli rooms and the Tribuna. The gallery is shut on Mondays, which catches out more people than the queue does.
Rome, Florence, Venice: the museum tickets that sell out first.
Italian galleries run on capped time slots and they go weeks ahead. Three cities, what a ticket costs in each, and which single room you are actually queuing for.
Six cities where the museum ticket decides the day.
Rome and Florence sell timed slots months out. Paris keeps the Louvre open late on Fridays. Madrid lets you into the Prado for nothing in the last two hours. Amsterdam sells no ticket at the door at all. Six cities, and the museum day worth booking in each.
Six museums people cross borders to stand inside.
The Vatican, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Prado, the Borghese. Six buildings that shape whole itineraries, and the ticket or the guided hour that gets you into each one.
- 1Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance Ticketfrom $38
- 2Louvre Museum Timed-Entrance Ticketfrom $26
- 3Skip-The-Line Uffizi Gallery Timed Entry Ticketfrom $30
Four museums where the ticket has to be bought before you fly.
Most of a museum trip can be settled over breakfast. These four run on capped time slots and closed days that take no interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance TicketEntry runs in timed slots with a cap on the Sistine Chapel. The museums shut on Sundays apart from the last one of the month, which is free and unmanageable.
- 02Louvre Museum Timed-Entrance TicketTimed tickets only, and the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays. The Friday late opening is the quietest hour of the week.
- 03Florence Accademia Gallery Tour with Entrance Ticket IncludedThe David stands in one room with the queue outside it. The Accademia closes on Mondays and sells timed entry the rest of the week.
- 04Borghese Gallery Skip-the-Line Ticket & AudioguideTwo-hour visiting slots with a hard cap on numbers, and nothing at all sold at the door.
The museum tickets more travellers book than any other.
Every museum tour on the site →The entrances, guided halls and combined tickets that carry more visitors than anything else, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance Ticket
Enter the Vatican Museums at your reserved time through the GetYourGuide entrance, then follow the long route through ancient sculpture, maps, Raphael’s Rooms, and the Sistine Chapel. Choose an audio guide in 10 languages, but note that this is an entry ticket, not a guided tour.
From · $38
Read our review →
2
Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel & St. Peter’s Basilica Tour
from $72
3
Louvre Museum Timed-Entrance Ticket
from $26
4
Van Gogh Museum Ticket
from $32
5
Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel & St Peter’s Basilica Guided Tour
from $22
6
9/11 Memorial & Museum Timed-Entry Ticket
from $25
7
Tower of London and Crown Jewels Exhibition Ticket
from $48
8
Skip-The-Line Uffizi Gallery Timed Entry Ticket
from $30
Guided, skip-the-line or audio: what a museum ticket buys you.
The same collection sells three different visits. The difference is not the art, it is how long you stand outside and how much of the inside you understand.
Forty rooms, edited down to twelve
A good museum guide is an editor. You see less of the Louvre and understand far more of it, and you never stand at a junction working out which way the arrows point.
When the queue is the visit
At the Vatican and the Uffizi the line outside is the day, not the art. A timed ticket turns three hours of pavement into a walk through a side door.
Audio guides and self-guided routes
The cheapest way through a large collection, and the only one that lets you stand in front of a single painting for twenty minutes. Bring headphones; most of the apps download before you go.
What a museum ticket actually costs, band by band.
Every tour and ticket on the site, sorted by price. Most of the world’s great collections cost less to walk into than lunch across the road.
Plain entry tickets, timed slots and audio guides. Most of the great collections sit in this band.
- 1Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance Ticketfrom $38
- 2Louvre Museum Timed-Entrance Ticketfrom $26
- 3Van Gogh Museum Ticketfrom $32
Guided halls, small groups, and the combined tickets that cover two or three buildings in a day.
Private guides, after-hours access, and the long days that pair a museum with the site its collection came out of.
Two Egyptian museums, one plateau, and eight hours in between.
Tutankhamun’s gold now sits in the Grand Egyptian Museum out at Giza; the old red building on Tahrir Square keeps the rest of the collection. Nearly every tour pairs one of them with the pyramids, which is why the good ones run all day.
Every museum day in Egypt →
The museums that hold a seven-year-old for two hours.
Old-master galleries are a hard sell before ten in the morning. Illusions, dinosaurs, science floors and a chocolate factory are not. These are the museum tickets that work when the group has short legs.
By city — where the collection stands
By collection — the museum you came for
The newest museum tours and tickets to land here.
The rest of the new ones →
The National Gallery of Art DC – Exclusive Guided Museum Tour
Read our review →
National Gallery of London Museum Tour Semi-Private 8ppl Max
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British Museum & National Gallery of London Semi-Private 8ppl Max
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Auschwitz Birkenau Guided Tour Small Group with Hotel Pick up
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Cappadocia Red Tour (with zelve Open Air Museum and Paşabağ)
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National Gallery Guided Tour with Art Expert Guide
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Caen: Guided D-Day Sites Tour & Caen Memorial Museum Ticket
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Auschwitz Birkenau Museum Guided Tour with Pickup
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Ghetto, Jewish Cemetery & POLIN Museum Private Tour
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Smithsonian Museum of Natural History – Exclusive Guided Tour
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African American History Tour with Museum of African American History Ticket
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