If you are like about 99% of the rest of us, money will be one of the major issues in your RTW journey. Once you’ve purchased your round the world tickets you are just beginning, as nearly every hour of the day brings some new expense that you didn’t plan for. Well, here is one thing that can sometimes save you a bit of dough if you know enough to look for them – city passes.

What are city passes?

These are fairly new on the tourism scene, and I’m not sure who came up with this idea first, but at this point I’ve noticed that nearly every major city on the planet has its own variation. Basically, for one price you get free admission to a long list of that city’s best and most famous attractions, and usually you get free transportation thrown in for good measure. They are almost all sold in a 24-hour, 48-hour, and 72-hour version, with the per-day price getting more reasonable the longer you go, but of course the total price keeps going up.

Some research is very worthwhile

Just do a google search for “(city name) city pass” and you are sure to find it on top of the results, even if they’ve used a slightly different name for the thing. Just having a quick look at the prices for the cards is a good way to judge how expensive the attractions are in that city, but it’s also very important to see what’s included because in some cases you could be disappointed.

For example, I’m about to go to London, and I wouldn’t mind trying the London Eye thing, but it’s not included with the London Pass. And since most of the museums there are already free, there just isn’t enough left to make it worthwhile to me. In Amsterdam (where it’s called the iAmsterdam Card), the Anne Frank House isn’t included, though nearly everything else you might want to see is on there.

New York City has an unusual one, as the New York City Pass actually goes for a whole week instead of just a few days. It also includes most of the most important sites at a very reasonable price, so I’d recommend that one to anyone on their first trip there.

Strategies for using the city pass

For most of these city passes there is a 24-hour option, which sometimes means one calendar day, but other times actually means 24 hours. If you find one that will work from, say, 2pm one day until 2pm the following day, then they can be ideal since you can obviously hit a couple places late one day and a few more the following morning, which helps avoid attraction fatigue.

Even if they are good for only one actual day they are sometimes very worthwhile as they allow you to do one attraction blitz and get all your checklist attractions out of the way, so you have time for whatever else sounds good the remaining days in town. These things often let you skip ticket lines as well, so seeing perhaps 3 museums and one other type of attraction in one day is quite possible, and you’ll get free transportation all day to make it just that much easier.