Alright, so most of you aren’t participating in the things I was talking about.
Doesn’t answer why there are a lot of people who do that don’t buy tickets before hand.
Waiting 2 hours just to buy tickets to get into a museum or ancient cathedral doesn’t sound like a very time efficient way to spend ones visit. Yet there are a slew of people doing it. Why? You can even buy the ticket on a phone for crying out loud!
I assume the combination of spontaneity and simply not being aware you can buy tickets in advance. What other answer can there be?
Not thinking to do it on your phone is certainly part of it.
But the other part is not everyone vacations with the idea of spending their time efficiently. For some people (my wife being one example) NOT having to be efficient about spending time is her favorite part of vacation. She would rather see 3 things on whim over 9 things planned.
I’d much rather plan it out too, but after 30 years we’ve reached some middle ground.
I don’t like to plan my visits. If I go somewhere and there’s a long line, I go somewhere else.
When I was in Paris I didn’t bother with the Eiffel Tower and got a great view of the city from the steps of the Sacre Coeur. Didn’t go in at the Louvre (It was a lot of money just to see one painting 
), though I sat in the courtyard. I went to the Musee d’Orsay instead.
But if there’s a long line waiting to get tickets, it means it’s too crowded inside, too.
I’ve tried, they required buying in advance for that.
That part is down to not knowing it’s possible and/or not knowing there would be insanely long lines and/or not having a data package that wouldn’t make it prohibitively expensive to pull out the phone and buy a ticket once you saw the line.
It’s not really a big mystery. Personally I’ve traveled to quite a few places and most of the time there just aren’t long lines, so I don’t worry about that ahead of time. And I’ve rarely decided ahead of time what I’m going to do. Even going to Paris it was “maybe I’ll see the Louvre, maybe I’ll want to go up the tower”.
I think I was there in mid-November of '04; overcast and drizzly, and my train got in almost at sunrise.
Now that I think about it, the bad lines weren’t for tickets. I walked to the Eiffel Tower, got a ticket, and then took the first elevator. I wanted to see all of the Tower, so I figured I’d go to the top first and check out the other levels on the way down. So I went to the top, looked around for a while, and came down to the second level. It was jammed. I got to the railing to look out at the city, and after a bit more wandering around it seemed like there was some organization to the crowd. I figured they were all waiting for the elevator to the top, but they must have already had their tickets. I took the stairs down from there, and I don’t remember any crowds at the bottom waiting for tickets.
The Louvre was kinda the same. I don’t remember having to wait to get a ticket, but there was a line to see the Mona Lisa.
Honestly, it’s underwhelming, assuming you’re talking about the Mona Lisa. At least to me. (I’m sure a lot of art I like is underwhelming to people, too.) It’s also much smaller than I had envisioned and behind a glass case, IIRC. Luckily, it was pretty cheap, from what I remember, as I was student. I was impressed by the Monet gallery, though. I’m not into impressionism and not generally a fan of Monet, but that was the highlight of the Louvre for me.
Now, the Centre Pompidou (and its Musée National d’Art Moderne), on the other hand, is more my speed and never had an issue with lines there (although my sample size is only two, both in the fall, off-peak).
There also is a lesser known place where you can buy tickets for the Louvre, while you’re there. I don’t know for certain if it’s still there, but it was around when I was there, though I had not known its exact location and mobile internet wasn’t a thing back then to look it up. Looking on its website, it does still appear to be active.
We just came back from a week in WDC and NYC. We had two days in Washington to see a lot, so tickets to venues that are always crowded were necessary. Special exhibits at museums allow limited numbers of people at one time, so if you don’t have a ticket you’ll be stuck in a line. My wife does a terrific job of planning out our itinerary with a combination of structured and unstructured time. Without at least some research and planning, you’re going to miss a lot of what’s available.
Sure, but it really depends on what your priorities/interest are in visiting a city. I can honestly say in the 30 countries and 100+ cities/towns or so I’ve visited, I’ve never once felt like, damn, I wish I had thought a little ahead/bought a ticket in advance/missed an opportunity to see something because of poor planning/etc. My wife tends to be the researcher and planner, and it irks me a bit, because it’s not my style at all (like I said, I prefer traveling alone for that reason), but I want to stay married to her, so I go along with it. Not that things are structured all that much with her, but even the little tiny bit of structure is more than I typically go for. That said, with a couple of young children now, her style is probably much wiser.
Vive la difference!
In general I’d say most people just aren’t “planners” in this way, especially where vacation is concerned since it’s supposed to be fun and planning is seen by many as work. For our honeymoon, I didn’t plan a detailed hour-by-hour agenda but for most of the big attractions that I knew we wanted to see, I booked tix in advance and it was a massive time saver (not to mention money saver, since booking ahead is often cheaper…)
Disney is crazy organized and planned now. I’ve not been since 1997 but many of my friends have gone, and there’s quite a demand for Disney travel agents these days. Everything’s digitized with wristbands now I believe. Fast Pass, and in general pre-preparedness, for Disney are big things.
Yes, the Fast Pass system (now called Fast Pass +) is completely different from what it was in 2002. It’s very popular and people go online at midnight the day they are eligible to make their FastPass+ choices because they fill up.
Everyone else has made the point about spontaneity and flexibility, but there’s also the fact that not everyone has such a strong aversion to lines. digs alluded to it as characteristically British, but I am an American, and I just don’t get the trouble that people have with lines. Part of visiting a special place with a long history is that you might have to wait to see it – it’s part of the experience. So for me the ability to avoid lines doesn’t outweigh the disadvantage of losing flexibility.
I have the same issue with purchasing movie tickets in advance. Yeah, I think I want to see that movie at that time, but what if I end up feeling like seeing something completely different, or not seeing a movie at all? I always feel like it’s a gamble to buy the ticket in advance and then be forced to go to that particular show.
In the post immediately before yours, I posited that some cultures might not mind, might even LIKE standing on line.
I was travelling with Euro-friends, they saw a long line stretching around a corner… and immediately got in it. With NO idea what it was for (I finally said “This is crazy” and headed to the front to see what we were waiting for).
ETA: Sorta ninja’d by SpoilerVirgin, thanks!
Yeah, I spent eight years in Europe and did a lot of the wandering thing, especially in cities. During the first six years it was my job to visit European embassies, so my off-time was spent wandering the streets, drinking beer and eating good food. When we were posted in Lisbon, however, most of our traveling was on weekends only, so we had to make the most of it, as we wanted to see everything the country has to offer. So our weekend trips were planned out pretty thoroughly because of the time constraints.
Things have changed considerably. When we were there a couple of Christmases ago, by midmorning it was too late to use your FastPass for anything, the whole rest of the day.
Frankly, I wish they’d go back to charging for individual rides, then pricing them so that the lines were reasonable.
I spend a lot of time on travel forums and I’m always surprised at how little research people do for an expensive trip such as an American traveling to Europe. At the very least, I’d suggest researching if advance tickets are a time saver for attractions that you might want to visit and decide if it is worth sacrificing flexibility to save an hour standing in a line. Of course, a weather dependent attraction such as the London Eye means that you’re probably only going to want to book in advance no sooner than the night before as it is pointless to spend the money during clouds and rain.
I generally have an outline of what I’d like to do on a trip and I try to rank sites as must do, nice to do, and if I have time. But, I do research to see if an attraction needs advance purchase. I wonder how many kids’ hearts have been broken when the parents find out that the Harry Potter Studio tour (London) sells out quickly and you can’t just show up and get in.
I certainly don’t agree with planning a trip like it is a military drill. But, I like to have an idea of what I’d probably do on each day of the trip with some weather flexibility built in. And, I do make a list of what’s open and closed on a particular day. It might be a glorious day, but I’ll have to decide if I want to spend some of it inside a museum since it is closed on the next day and it would be my only chance to see it.
I’m a big planner. We were recently in Rome and I bought advance tickets for the Vatican Museum. I’m sure glad I did: The line for people without tickets was insane!
I get severe pains in my legs when I stand too long, so I hate standing in long lines. I’ll do anything to avoid them.