Before I left for London, my wife wanted to buy the London Pass.  She thought it would be a great idea to buy the pass and then get “free” entrance into many London attractions.  Naturally, I was a bit skeptical.  The attraction operators want their money, so you’ll probably be paying almost as much for the pass as you will for the individual attractions, right?

Although I convinced my wife not to buy the pass, my aunt bought us two two-day passes as a gift.  They were already paid for, and it wasn’t money out of my pocket, so this was great!  It was definitely a great convenience to have.  We walked around London, using the London Pass book as a guide to tell us what to do for those first two days, and we didn’t have to worry about paying any of the fairly expensive entrance fees.

I can’t argue with the convenience of having this pass, but I was still left with the nagging doubt… was it worth it?  Would I have bought it myself, if I had done the research?  Well, here’s a lowdown on what we did with the pass and how much money it really ended up being worth for us.

Before you consider purchasing the pass yourself, go to the London Pass website and see for yourself what it has to offer.  You may not enjoy everything that we did, so my description may seem unappealing.  There are plenty of attractions included, though, so you just need to weigh the cost of what you want to do against what the Pass has to offer.

Let’s take a look at what a two-day pass costs, what I did with mine, and how the prices measure up.

Currently, a two-day adult pass costs £46.00 (without travel).  That breaks down to £23.00 per day.

Day One

We visited Southwark Cathedral.  Entrance to this cathedral is normally free, but the London Pass entitled us to a free audio guide and a souvenir guidebook.  This was approximately a £5.00 value.

After strolling around for a bit, we headed over to the Tower of London.  Here, we got free entrance (£16.00 value) and we also got to enter through the group entrance.  The line was significantly shorter.  On a busy day, that’s priceless.

We had planned on visiting the Tower Bridge Exhibition as well (£6.00 value).  However, we got a late start, got lost a bit walking around town, and ended up staying at the Tower of London until most of the attractions closed in the evening (around 5:00 PM).

That evening, we looked through the Special Offers which were included in the London Pass for dinner.  One in particular caught our eye.  Porter’s English Restaurant offered a free bottle of house wine with the purchase of two entrees.  So, we relaxed for a few hours, headed to Covent Garden in the evening, and took advantage of this offer.  The bottle of wine is approximately a £10.00 value.  It was good, too.  However, we only got one bottle of wine, so it was really a £5.00 value per person.

Total: £26.00

Day Two

Looking through the guidebook, we noticed the Sherlock Holmes museum and thought it would be an interesting place to start the morning.  We headed over to Baker Street and perused the house, made up to look like Sherlock Holmes’ own house and office, for a half hour or so.  The Pass entitled us to free entrance, a £6.00 value.

We then wandered over to Westminster to watch the changing of the guard, and we headed to Westminster Abbey.  This, unfortunately, is not included in the London Pass.

We planned on going to Vinopolis for a wine tasting tour, but Westminster Abbey took up a bit too much time.  If we had made it there, I’m sure it would have been a great time and a £16.00 value.

We did make it to St. Paul’s Cathedral for our last stop of the day.  The Pass entitled us to free entry, a £9.50 value.

For the evening’s entertainment, we again looked through the Special Offers.  My wife wanted to go to the Medieval Banquet, so I agreed and off we went.  It was fairly expensive (£80.00 per person for dinner and entertainment), but the Pass offered a 10% discount.  That’s an £8.00 value.

Total: £23.50

Total for the two days: £49.50

So… it turned out that the London Pass was about the same price as all of the attractions we were actually able to see.  Had we planned more efficiently, we could have gone to Vinopolis and the Tower Bridge Exhibition, boosting the value of the pass.

However, that’s one of the problems with the pass.  If you’re only in London for two days, and you buy a two day pass, you’ll want to visit only the attractions available through the Pass to maximize your value.  Chances are, though, that’ll you want to see something else too - like Westminster Abbey.

If you’re planning on going to London, I would highly recommend checking out the London Pass.  It’s convenience is unparallelled - you don’t have to carry around a lot of cash or swipe your credit card at every stop.

If you are going to London for three or more days, then purchasing a two day Pass can be a great value.  Simply plan all of the unincluded attractions for the third or fourth day, so that the first two days you can spend exclusively in Pass-paid-for attractions.

Also, consider whether or not you’re going to some of the most expensive attractions, like the Tower of London.  If you want to visit Windsor Castle (we did, but we went with a separate tour group on a different day), this can greatly boost the value of your pass.

Bottom line, it is very convenient.  It may be worth it.  It may not be.  You’ll have to work up an itinerary to decide if the pass is right for you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.