Karlstejn Castle Tours and Tickets

Tour I is the imperial residence. Fifty-five minutes through the first and second floors of the Imperial Palace and the first floor of the Marian Tower: the courtiers' hall, the knights' hall with its chapel of St Nicholas, the emperor's bedchamber with the chapel of St Wenceslas, the audience hall, the banqueting hall, the treasury with a copy of the crown of St Wenceslas, and the old prison. It also gets you the Well Tower, which is not guided and is reached freely from the main courtyard: a well 78 metres deep with a medieval treadwheel over it.

Tour II is the chapels, and it is what most people mean when they say Karlstejn. The eastern wing of the Imperial Palace, the second floor of the Marian Tower with the Church of the Virgin Mary and the chapel of St Catherine, the original medieval wall paintings on the Great Tower staircase, the lapidarium, and the Chapel of the Holy Cross itself. The castle's own pages describe this route unevenly, and the chapel is sometimes named in the text for Tour III instead, so book Tour II by its number and its date rather than by a description you read somewhere.

Tour III is the whole castle: the floors above the Chapel of the Holy Cross that are closed the rest of the time, the private rooms of Charles IV, and the view from the Great Tower, which is normally shut. It runs three hours, takes six people at most, and leaves at 11:00 on selected dates only.

Read that twice, because it is the opposite of every other monument in this catalogue. The base tour cannot be reserved by a couple, a family or a solo traveller. Reservations open only for organised groups of ten or more, at a booking fee of 20 CZK a head. Everybody else turns up at the ticket office and joins the next departure, and since those leave every ten minutes, on a July Saturday that is a formality.

Off season it is not. A tour needs five people, free places counted, or it waits for the next one, and the only exception is the last tour of the day, which departs whatever the number. That exception is worth knowing if you are two people in March: the last slot is the one that cannot strand you. Children under six travel free on Tour I but still have to be named in a group reservation, because they count towards the group total.

Tour II works the other way round. Booking is compulsory for everyone, individuals included, the castle prefers the telephone, and e-mail bookings are not accepted inside four days of the visit. Tour III is advance sale or online only. So of the three routes, the cheapest is the one you cannot reserve and the dearest are the ones you cannot walk up to.

Tour III is priced in a way nothing else in this catalogue is priced. One thousand eight hundred korunas, and the same 1,800 for a pensioner, a student aged 18 to 24, a disabled visitor, a child of ten and a baby under five. No reductions and no free places exist on it, so a family of four pays 7,200 CZK before anything else is bought. With a ceiling of six people it is effectively a private visit sold at a published price, and the National Heritage Institute's annual pass, which is accepted on the other two routes, is explicitly not accepted here.

The reductions on the cheaper routes are worth reading in the same breath, because they do not behave consistently. On Tour I a child of 6 to 17 pays 90 CZK and an under-five goes free. On Tour II the same child pays 190, and so does the under-five: the free place that exists on Tour I does not survive the move to Tour II. A couple with a toddler who assume the baby is free will be asked for another 190 korunas at the window, and the window does not negotiate.

Ten listings, all from a single supplier, 418 reviews and a weighted 4.896, which is the highest rating anywhere in the Czech catalogue. Read it with the distribution in front of you though. 319 of those 418 reviews belong to one product, an eight-hour day pairing the castle with a choice of caves or a brewery at 135 EUR and rated 4.9. The average here is that product's average, with nine much smaller ones arranged around it.

The nine are mostly private cars: 8 of the 10 listings overall, from 151.80 to 565 EUR, with a median of 216.07 and a vintage convertible at the top end. Not one of the ten runs under five hours, three fill eight, nine allow free cancellation and none of them confirms your booking on the spot, which fits a castle whose base tour cannot be reserved at all.

Two conclusions, and neither is comfortable. A catalogue of ten products from one company is fragile: if that supplier stops listing Karlstejn, most of what is here goes with it. And ten products with 319 reviews on one of them and single figures on several others is not a market that has reached a verdict. It is one well-sold day trip and a long tail of cars, and the 4.896 belongs mostly to the first.