If you are a lover of museums headed to the City of Lights, the Paris Museum Pass is a tempting offering. For 48 euro for a 2-day Paris Museum Pass, you can gain entry to more than 50 museums, monuments and attractions. But the question is: Is the Paris Museum Pass worth it?

Answer: It depends. 

For Shaina and I, the Paris Museum Pass was absolutely worth our investment for several reasons — most specifically, our travel style. On the other hand, I can’t say we would have gotten our money’s worth if Chris and I had purchased it while traveling in Paris with the kids last spring.

Here’s a look at our itinerary, by the way.

Running the numbers with the Paris Museum Pass

So, the Paris Museum Pass runs 48 euro for the 2-day pass, 62 euro for a 4-day pass and 74 euro for 6-day pass. As Shaina and I were there together from midday Thursday to early Sunday, and planned to see Versailles on Saturday, we opted for the 2-day pass. During that time, we covered a pretty serious number of museum and monuments (though not necessarily thoroughly — I’ll get to that.)

So, let’s run the numbers with what we would have spent buying tickets to each place individually rather than using the Paris Museum Pass.

Musee de l’Orangerie: 9 euro

Musee d’Orsay: 12 euro (note: you can get a combined Orsay/Orangerie ticket for 16 euro)

Les Invalides (Napoleon’s Tomb, war museum): 12 euro

La Louvre: 15 euro

Musee Rodin: 10 euro

Pantheon (me only on Thursday morning): 9 euro

Sainte-Chappelle (honorable mention): 10 euro

All told, paying individually for these tickets would have cost us 67 euro without Sainte Chapelle, or 77 euro with. (Though if we’d bought joint Orsay-Orangerie tickets it would have come out 5 euro cheaper). The reason I’m hedging on including Sainte Chapelle is because we didn’t actually make it inside — we mistakenly thought it was open until 6, but it actually closed at 5 during that time of year. We made it there shortly before 5:30 p.m. after a leisurely walk — if we’d known, we’d have been able to make it in time and thus use the card. But c’est la vie!

The real value: guilt-free travel with the Paris Museum Pass

So, from a pure numbers perspective, in our case it absolutely made sense to get the Paris Museum Pass. We saved somewhere in the neighborhood of 20+ euro by doing so. However, for us the real value of the Paris Museum Pass was more about accommodating our style of travel and freeing us from guilt.

As you read the above, you might have thought — gee, that’s a hell of a lot of stuff to have seen in just two days. Surely they can’t have seen it all properly? Congratulations, you are absolutely correct.

While we spent quite a lot of time in Orsay and Orangerie, neither of us had much interest in the Louvre since it is so overwhelming. But, already being in the Tuileries and with the museum open for another 40 minutes, we made the spur of the moment decision to pop in so Shaina could see “the big three”: Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and Venus de Milo. We’d have been crazy to pay 15 euro to do that, but with the Paris Museum Pass there was no real reason not to. Boom. Bucket list-type item checked off the list.

We actually ended up popping in to Napoleon’s Tomb for exactly the same reason — we emerged from the Varenne metro station en route to somewhere else and thought, why not? As I’ve mentioned before, Chris and I took the kids to Les Invalides last spring and spent a lot of time in the War Museum. This time around, Shaina and I didn’t necessarily have time to wander through the extensive museum, but since we had the Paris Museum Pass there was no reason not to stop and admire the tombs at Les Invalides.

Having the Paris Museum Pass also made us feel less guilty about ditching the Rodin museum when we got bored. While the garden was cool and worth a visit, by the time we got indoors we realized we didn’t care as much about statutes as possibly we’d imagined. Normally paying for something and then bailing on it before seeing *everything* makes my cheap heart hurt, but with the Paris Museum Pass? Not so much. Which I realize doesn’t make that much sense but … there it is.

Other perks with the Paris Museum Pass

The Paris Museum Pass is also billed as allowing you to skip the line for some attractions. In our case, that was less of a big deal because we were there mostly mid-week during chilly March. Still, it was nice not to wait in the few lines we did see. However, that’s not to say you can just skip into whatever attractions without waiting. As you could have probably guessed, security is tight in Paris. Thus, the few lines we waited in (excluding Versailles) were almost exclusively to get through security. During peak season, however, I would say there is likely to be a considerable time savings in not having to buy individual tickets everywhere we went.

So, is the Paris Museum Pass worth it? 

If you are trying to cram as much sight-seeing as possible into a few days and are traveling with adults or (at the very least) older children, then yes.

If you are the type of person who is going to spend five hours taking in each museum, on the other hand, you’ll probably not be jumping around to enough sights to get the full value of the pass. If you know that hitting three or four museums/attractions per day isn’t your speed, it probably isn’t for you.

On the other hand, if you are traveling with young children as we usually are, you’ll want to think carefully about whether the pass is worth it as well. Fellow blogger Melissa spells out some of the considerations in her excellent Paris with children guide, including the option to simply prebuy tickets to the attractions you plan to visit.

The main thing is being realistic about your expectations when traveling with kids. Shaina got off the plane Thursday without having slept hardly at all, then promptly walked more than 10 miles, visited several museums and sat through a 3-hour long dinner that evening. Parents, you know that isn’t happening if you’ve got preschoolers or toddlers in tow.

Overall, deciding whether the Paris Museum Pass is worth it comes down just running the numbers and — seriously — knowing yourself well.