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Join Which? TravelEurope's most famous tourist attractions are sold out? Unless you're willing to pay £130 for a £19 ticket
Tourists are paying inflated fees for sites like the Alhambra and the Last Supper
Jo is an award-winning travel journalist and hiking holiday enthusiast. Her specialisms include sustainable travel and money-saving advice.
The Last Supper has long been Milan’s hottest ticket. It should cost just €15 (£13) to see Leonardo da Vinci’s religious masterpiece – one of the most famous paintings in the world.
But the strict 15-minute viewing slot is limited to 40 visitors, so tickets are in high demand. When we checked the Last Supper website, only two dates were available over the next three months.
We still found tickets, except these were on the ever-growing range of third-party websites that almost always seem to have availability. On one of the biggest sites, GetYourGuide, there were tickets for the Last Supper the very next day.
This article first appeared in Which? Travel magazine. We don't accept freebies from travel companies, airlines, or hotels, so you can be sure that our investigations, recommendations, and reviews are completely unbiased.
Can you get last-minute tickets for the Alhambra and the Last Supper?
So what’s the catch? The experience (which is bundled in with a guided walking tour of Milan itself) costs a staggering £89 – nearly seven times the price.
It’s a similar story for the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. When we checked, the earliest we could nab an official €22 (£19) ticket was in five days’ time. For next-day availability, you’d need to pay £68 with GetYourGuide.
Viator, a platform owned by Tripadvisor, had tickets in two days but they were even more expensive, at £130. These checks were for September. It will be even more of a scramble in peak summer and around the Easter and Christmas holidays.
Higher visitor numbers combined with stricter capacity limits mean that securing a ticket for some of the world’s top tourist attractions has become infinitely more challenging. For tourists, it means paying more for packages you probably don’t want – or missing out completely.
Tickets for top tourist attractions
| Days until ticket available | Cheapest ticket | Days until ticket available on Viator | Cheapest ticket on Viator | Days until ticket available on GetYourGuide | Cheapest ticket on GetYourGuide | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alhambra | 5 | £19 | 2 | £130 (group tour) | 1 | £68 (group tour) |
| Harry Potter | 2 | £105 (1 adult and 1 child) | 1 | £180 (with coach from London) | 1 | £171 (with coach from London) |
| Last Supper | 2 | £13 | 7 | £130 (group tour) | 1 | £89 (with Milan walking tour) |
Who are GetYourGuide and Viator?
Sites like GetYourGuide and Viator are booking platforms rather than ticketing sites. They list tours, excursions and activities from third-party providers, which you then book with.
It’s why you’ll see so many different types of bundles that include entry to multiple parts of attractions, access to other sites as well as completely unrelated tours, transport and services.
When we looked up Colosseum tours and tickets on Viator, there were more than 1,000 results, some of which had very poor reviews.
It can be confusing to work out what you’re actually getting too. ‘Explore the whole Alhambra,’ the description begins on Viator’s £17 Alhambra Complex Guided Tour. So you may be surprised to learn that an entry ticket is not included. Instead, you will be led around the gardens for 1hr 45mins admiring the external views. As one reviewer remarked: ‘We booked a complete tour of the Alhambra … the tour was anything but complete.’
We also discovered that it was difficult to find the official site for some attractions, as they’re often buried below third-party platforms. When we googled ‘Louvre official tickets’, the AI overview surfaced a copycat site – with the link taking us straight to GetYourGuide (and its inflated prices). When we googled ‘Colosseum tickets’, the official site was listed fourth, after Viator and GetYourGuide.
Even when we found the Colosseum website, it was confusing. There were a baffling nine ticket types – each granting access to various parts of the amphitheatre. And it’s really difficult to work out which one is best.
The ‘Full Experience – Underground & Arena’ is arguably the most comprehensive ticket, but it was almost always sold out, when we checked. We had to wait 20 days for the next available slot – or you could pay Viator an extra £287 for the same access the next day.
6 sightseeing tips to spend less — but see more — on city breaks
How to buy entrance tickets for the world’s busiest attractions
Your attraction may be included in the city’s tourist pass. You’ll almost always still have to book a slot, but sometimes there can be additional availability.
For example, the Paris Museum Pass covers entry to The Louvre and, as passholders, we were offered two earlier slots for the next day when we checked.
Bear in mind, even if your ticket promises ‘skip-the-line’ access – you can’t jump the security queue and will still have to wait up to 30 minutes to pass through the mandatory bag checks and metal detectors. And city passes are only worth buying if you want to visit a certain number of attractions.
CrowdAvoid app: the quietest times to visit top tourist sites
CrowdAvoid is a free app for iPhone and Android that can help in working out when popular tourist attractions might have available tickets. It collates data on hundreds of top attractions around the world, and predicts crowd levels.
Crowding is colour-coded from ‘low’ to ‘very crowded’ hour-by-hour, meaning you can identify the quietest days and months to visit a tourist hotspot.
When we checked the Louvre, we could see that a midweek visit in November was quietest – either when the doors opened at 9am or for the last entry slot of the day.
If you’re planning a city break, make sure to book any popular attractions well in advance to avoid paying through the nose on third-party sites.
The Alhambra can sell out up to three months in advance in high season. For the most coveted attractions, find out when general tickets are released and set an alarm (for local time) to avoid missing out.