Palace of Versailles Tickets and Guided Visits

Versailles is sold as one place and works as three. The palace has a time printed on the ticket and closes on Monday. The Trianon estate, which holds the Grand Trianon, the Petit Trianon and the Queen's Hamlet, does not open until midday. The gardens open at seven in the morning, never close for the week, and are free for roughly half the year. Almost every complaint about a wasted day here comes from treating those three timetables as one. The 33 listings we track for Versailles carry 20,366 reviews, more than the rest of France put together, and a median price of 159 EUR against 35 for the estate's own full ticket.

What that 159 EUR buys is the journey and the person. Nineteen of the 33 listings are recorded as starting in Paris and eleven at Versailles itself, five include hotel pickup, and eleven are private tours, which is why the third quartile sits at 420 EUR while the cheapest listing is 55. The estate is half an hour from central Paris on the RER C and a single fare is 2.55 EUR, so nothing sold here competes on price with doing it yourself. What it competes on is a fixed departure, somebody holding the reservation, and a guide who has been through the state rooms before.

The other thing to settle before choosing anything is what the words on the ticket mean. A timed ticket at Versailles is a promise of admission within half an hour of the time you picked, which is not the same as no queue, and there are two separate security checks between the street and the state rooms that no ticket removes. The estate is direct about this in a way resellers rarely are. It also sells no palace-only ticket in 2026: the Passport at 35 EUR is the ticket, and it includes the Trianon and the gardens whether you plan to walk that far or not.

Two shapes of product split the catalogue, and they overlap. Twenty listings are day trips built around transport out of Paris, twenty are guided visits where somebody meets you at the estate, and since the destination holds 33 rather than 40, seven products are counted as both. They do not fail in the same way, which is why they sit on separate pages of this site. The scores differ before you read a word: the day trips run 4.43 weighted across 12,815 reviews, the guided visits 4.60 across 8,962, and the two sets share enough products that the review counts add up to more than the estate's own 20,366.

Underneath both sits a rating spread worth staring at. The best-rated Versailles product with a meaningful sample is a private half-day with hotel pickup at 5.0 from 183 reviews and 637 EUR. The worst is a full-day guided tour with Trianon entry at 4.0 from 185 reviews and 120.94 EUR. Same palace, same rooms, one full point apart. What separates them is length, group size and how much of the day is spent moving, and none of that is visible in a listing title.

Two numbers decide most Versailles bookings: how many hours you are prepared to give the day, and whether you want the estate or only the palace. The listings in this catalogue sort cleanly along both, from ninety-minute guided walks through the state rooms to eleven and a half hour days that add Giverny on the way home.