Sightseeing tips
Tips and advice for how to get the most out of seeing the sights, museums, and monuments during your British vacation
You'd think that the sightseeing would be one place where your costs are fixed and there's no wiggle room for savings—besides the obvious (and undesirable) option of simply skipping the sights.
After all, if the Tower of London wants to charge £28 to get in, you're just going to have to pay £28 or miss the Crown Jewels, right?
Wrong.
Are you under 16? You get in for £13. Under 26? Get a student ID and its £22. Over 60? Again, its £22. Families can get a discount ticket covering up to three children (£50 with one adult, £70 with two).
Even if you are a lone adult, if you book a ticket ahead of time online, you can save a bit—the online ticket rate is £24 (and lower for all the other categories, too).
Read on for these and other strategies for saving money on your sightseeing.
Online ticket prices can be cheaper than buying them on-site (and will also save you time waiting in line)
Be a sightseeing V.I.P.—Sightseeing passes grant admission to dozens of sights, avoiding the lines and saving money
- Viator.com - Best one-stop shopping site for all sorts of activities, walking tours, bus tours, escorted day trips, and other excursions. It is actually a clearinghouse for many local tour companies and outfitters, and since it gets a bulk-rate deal on pricing (and takes only a token fee for itself), you can actually sometimes book an activity through Viator for less than it would cost to buy the same exact tour from the tour company itself. (I once booked a Dublin pub crawl via Viator and later discovered that I saved about $1.50; also, the tour turned out to be sold-out, and they were turning away the folks in front of me in line, but since I had a pre-booked voucher I got in.)Partner
- Londonwalks.com - Since the 1970s, the gold standard in city walking tours and museum tours—and cheap, to boot. Just meet your guide at the appointed time and place (usually a Tube stop), pay your £10 (students or over 65s are £8; under 15 free), and prepare for a good two hours of amazing cultural insight and historic anecdotes. If you plan on taking three or more walks, buy a "Frequent London Walker" card for £2 from your first guide, then each subsequent walk costs £8. They also run popular excursions outside London for £18. Note that the fee just covers the guided tour; you pay for any admissions (or, for excursions, travel expenses) yourself.
- Contexttravel.com - This bespoke walking tour company doesn't even call its 200 tour leaders "guides." It calls them "docents"—perhaps because most guides are academics and specialists in their fields: history professors, archeologists, PhDs, art historians, artists, etc. Groups are miniscule (often six people maximum), and most docents can be booked for private guiding sessions as well. They aren't always the cheapest tours, but they are invariably the best. People rave about Context.Partner
- City-discovery.com - Chief rival to Viator (though with a less spiffy interface and often sub-par text descriptions), representing many of the same tours (at the same prices). However, it also seems to cover more destinations, especially secondary ones. When it comes down to it, City-Discovery and Viator have maybe 70% the same inventory, but then 30% will be completely different (some Viator has City-Discovery does not, other vice-versa) so it pays to check through the offerings from both.Partner
More on Sightseeing tips
Be a sightseeing V.I.P.—Sightseeing passes grant admission to dozens of sights, avoiding the lines and saving money
Microtours in the U.K.—Guided walks, bus tours, museum tours, private guides, escorted sidetrips, and more
