I bought an advance ticket when I went to Chicago for the king tut exhibit. I had an early time and it was pleasantly empty. Not so when I exited at 10am. Long lines!!!
I don’t do much that requires tickets or standing in line. Arthritic hip, I travel alone, and the thought of Disney type vacations leaves me with the willies.
Going to NYC in June. I plan on a couple of touristy things, but mostly just wandering around.
Yeah, we’ve had good luck going to anything early.
We call it “Before the tourists wake up.”
(a variant of what we call going to our local just-off-campus greasy spoon for breakfast at 7 am: “Before the students wake up.”)
My wife and I are all about the pre-purchased tickets as well. We take it a step further and choose which attraction is the highlight for the day for us and go there first ‘early’ to avoid crowds. We’ve found all across Europe and the U.K. most people don’t seem to get going until after 11am.
Having said that I can certainly understand the spontaneity crowd, and being willing to deal with a queue for a spur of the moment choice. Even if you’re in a queue for an hour or more you’re still standing in the sunshine (hopefully) in Paris under the Eiffel Tower!
FYI with specific reference to the Eiffel Tower, there is actually a cap on the number of online tickets they make available. So some of those people in the queue may have left it too late to buy online.
I’m curious where you are buying tickets online from, because I haven’t yet seen an attraction where you don’t have to as a minimum nominate the day you want them for. The Louvre tickets (as with the Eiffel Tower) are sold with an entry time.
For most people, this. Many people also don’t think of investigating the place in advance, apparently, beyond whatever they’ve gotten from a travel agent if they’ve used one. And sometimes even if they’ve been told something like “this tourist pass will get you both access to the on-off buses and entry to the most famous attractions”, their brains are just saturated by jetlag, tiredness, people talking weird, strange foods, strange manners, strange everything.
Another aspect is how much of a planner the people involved are. For my youngest brother and his wife, vacation involves Plans drawn to the minute (we’ll see how that works with a 3yo); for me and since a large chunk of my job involves making super-detailed plans, vacation is defined as “time when I don’t need to plan anything beyond ‘will eat at some point’”. Most people fall in between, and the immense majority of people suck at making plans.
When the Alhambra went to “reservations only”, the amount of visitors dropped - which was exactly the intent. It’s been years and they still get a lot of people who haven’t heard.
That’s a crucial point which is also true of many other attractions. That’s often a deliberate strategy.
The most obvious reason is that this makes it easier for them to control overcrowding inside the attraction. Timed tickets usually give the management little control over how long visitors spend inside, so they can only be a crude way of preventing overcrowding. But if a significant proportion of visitors are queuing to buy their tickets at the door, it is a simple step for the management to begin selling those tickets at a slower rate. That just means that those in the queue wait longer. The far less convenient alternative would be to have to tell those with timed tickets that they must wait, which would be the perfect way of creating acrimony and confusion. Selling only some tickets in advance gives the management much more flexibility.
But there can also be PR advantages in organising everything so that there is a long queue. This is a variation on the old Soviet principle that you should join any long queue because they must be selling something worth buying at the end of it. That certain attractions have long queues can reinforce the perception that those are the attractions worth visiting. Of course, common sense suggests that might not actually be the case, but for most tourists the herd mentality will trump common sense every time. The sweet spot for attractions is thus when they have a long queue and can sell advance tickets at higher prices.
For the Coliseum in Rome, advance tickets are good for any day, any time until the end of the year. However, you might have to wait if there are too many people inside.
Most tourist attractions now have a step where you go through security, and everyone has to pass through there no matter how the tickets were bought. They can, and do, manage crowd sizes by slowing down the security process, I’ve found.
Here they are the same price
I just tried to buy a single ticket to the top of the Eiffel tower online and there was nothing available no matter what date I chose.