Whenever there’s an option for a city pass, we evaluate the practicality of one. After creating scenarios and crunching numbers, we determined that The London Pass would be an economical choice for us. Hence, before arriving in London, we arranged for us to get them. Here’s our experience.
WHAT IS THE LONDON PASS?
According to the London Pass website:
The London Pass is a sightseeing city card which gives you entry to a choice of over 70 popular tourist attractions in the city. Available for either 1, 2, 3, 6 or 10 consecutive days, it makes sightseeing easy and affordable by giving you access to top sights in the city with one card.
WOULD GETTING THE LONDON PASS BE A WISE CHOICE?
Like I said, we studied whether getting the London Pass would be sensible or not. We wanted to save as much on attractions and activities, since we determined that those would eat a huge chunk of our budget—like entrances to museums can cost around 20 GBP (~1300 PHP).
We set our itinerary, listing down the attractions and activities we must do and researched on their prices. To justify and maximize the London Pass, we clumped those that were free or discounted admission with the pass into three days. Totaling everything, we saw that getting the pass was a good idea.
The London Pass website highlights a sample itinerary (pasted below), which we followed more or less, and as shown, savings can be more than 110 GBP (~7100 PHP). The numbers below aren’t exaggerations, by the way—admissions really do cost that much, as London is an expensive city to travel in.
BUYING A PASS
Browsing the London Pass website resulted to getting banner ads offering a 10% discount code on the three-day pass. We took advantage of the offer, so the pass came out to 90.90 GBP (~5900 PHP) from 101 GBP (~6530 GBP) each, increasing our savings further. Purchasing is easily done online, and the site accepts major credit cards.
The good thing about the London Pass is that it allows syncing of the pass to an app. This was the most convenient option for us, rather than having the physical passes delivered by courier or redeeming them somewhere in London.
 |
 |
USING THE PASS
Once we started our first day of touring, we activated our London Pass in our respective phones, and the clock on the app displayed how much time was remaining on the pass. Gaining entry into attractions was pretty straightforward—we just opened the app and showed the pass’s QR code to be quickly scanned by staff.
In some instances, there was a separate queue for London Pass holders, usually along with those who had pre-purchased tickets online. This saved us time, since queuing to buy tickets on the regular line almost always took longer than simply breezing through the “fast track” line.
ENJOYING THE ATTRACTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
We immensely enjoyed London as a city, as well as its attractions and activities. I’ll go into detail in subsequent posts, but for now, here are photos of some of the places we went to: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, and Shakespeare’s Globe. Admission to these is free with the London Pass.
For more information on The London Pass, log onto www.londonpass.com and check out its Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
