When Do Castle Tickets Go on Sale? At the Forbidden City, Seven Days Ahead at 20:00

These are two different problems with two different answers, and the booking page rarely tells you which one you are looking at. A monument that has sold its stock shows you a date with no availability. A monument that has not yet released the date shows you, in most cases, the same thing: a greyed-out square, or a calendar that simply stops.

The test is not what the page looks like. It is whether the body publishes a release rule at all. Where it does, count the days back from your date and you know whether the ticket exists yet. Where it does not, you are guessing, and so is everybody writing about it.

This matters commercially as well, and we have an interest to declare. When a date is not yet released, nobody can sell it to you, including us. An operator books against the same release, at the same hour, from the same finite stock. We set out what that means for price in our piece on what a castle ticket costs at the gate and what the page above it asks, and the booking rule is the other half of the same answer.

At four of the monuments below the window is measured in days, and in one case in a single hour of the evening. These are the places where booking early is not a virtue, because early does not exist.

The Palace Museum runs the strictest release in this catalogue and states it plainly. Its booking portal says that tickets, the Treasure Hall, the Watch Hall and the exhibitions will be reserved from 20:00 before the 7th day of visit. Every reservation is in a real name. Entry on the day you turn up is excluded in the museum's own words:

Work that backwards and the consequences are unusual. A Saturday visit goes on sale at eight in the evening on the previous Saturday, Beijing time, which for a traveller still in Europe is early afternoon. There is no early access for anybody, so the whole market for a date forms in one minute of one evening. The museum also caps cancellations at no more than one cancellation per person per day, which closes off holding two dates and dropping one.

The part almost nothing in English publishes is how a visitor without a Chinese identity document or a Chinese payment app is supposed to do any of this. There is a separate international portal at bookingticket.dpm.org.cn, reached from intl.dpm.org.cn rather than from the ticketing domain that surfaces in an English search. An account there needs an e-mail address and nothing else, the booking is made against a passport number, and the payment page accepts an ordinary international bank card. Entry is listed at CNY 60.

One correction to our own earlier wording, because it is the sort of thing this site exists to get right. We have described the Forbidden City as having no ticket counter at all. That goes further than the evidence. Counters do exist, with published hours, and in the museum's own documents they handle refunds and invoices; the payment page also carries an Apply for on-site payment option. What the museum excludes is the sale of a ticket on the day of the visit. Travellers have described buying at a window when the website was empty, and no page from the museum either authorises that or rules it out case by case. So the rule stands, and whether a particular counter will sell you a ticket on a particular morning is not something we can tell you. Plan for the seven-day clock, in your own name, with the passport you booked on.

One figure we had on record has not survived the check. We noted in September that the Summer Palace released fresh availability each evening at 21:00. Nothing we could reach on 28 October states a release time, and the municipal page gives only the one-to-seven-day window. An hour that cannot be confirmed is not a time to set an alarm by, so treat the window as the rule and the hour as unpublished.

The second kind of empty calendar has nothing to do with demand. At these places a whole route, or a whole house, is withdrawn for part of the year, and the booking page for a date in January is empty because there is nothing on sale in January. This is the case the aggregators miss most reliably, and it is the reason a visit gets planned around a room that will be shut.

The Peles closure is the one to act on this week. The museum's own page gives the castle as shut from 2 November to 1 December 2026 and Pelisor from 28 September to 3 November, both for routine upkeep. Anybody holding a Transylvania itinerary for November has four days of castle left, and the two houses are on different calendars, so the smaller one comes back just as the big one goes dark. This is the same trap we mapped in what shuts for winter in October and what only shortens its hours: the closure only ever lives on the owner's own page.

Two more things about Peles that change what early booking even means. There is no cash desk: the museum grants admission only on tickets from its own site or a SelfPay machine. And the ticket is immovable. The museum states that tickets bought for a scheduled visit cannot be rescheduled, which puts it at the strict end of everything on this page. Within the band on your ticket, entry is first come, first served, so being early inside your own window is worth more than being early in the day. The bands and the 100 lei circuit are set out on our Peles page.

Karlstejn sells no admission at all. It sells a place on a guided route, and there are three of them with three separate rulebooks. The base tour through the imperial residence of Charles IV costs 300 CZK and runs every ten minutes, and it is the one tour here that an individual is not allowed to book. Not sold out, not restricted by season. The facility does not exist, and the castle says so on its own reservation page:

Reservations open only for organised groups of ten or more, at a fee of 20 CZK a head, and everybody else turns up at the ticket office and joins the next departure. In July that is a formality. In November it is not, because no tour leaves with fewer than five people aboard, free places included, and the only departure exempt from that is the last of the day. Two people in a Bohemian November should aim for the final slot, which is the one that cannot strand them.

Tour II, the route that reaches the Chapel of the Holy Cross, works the opposite way round. Booking is compulsory for everyone, individuals included, the castle prefers the telephone, and e-mail is only processed if sent four or more days before the visit. There is also a floor under the whole thing that catches late planners: the castle will not take a booking for the day you telephone. So the cheapest route is the one you cannot reserve, and the dearest are the ones you cannot walk up to.

One contradiction we will print instead of quietly fixing, because it is the commonest fault in this vertical and we cannot resolve it from outside. On the castle's reservation page the Christmas closure reads 22th till 25th December CLOSED. On its opening hours page the same closure is given as 21 to 25 December. One body, two pages, one day apart. If you are planning around that week, telephone instead of trusting either number, and note that the chapels route is closed then in any case. Our Karlstejn page carries the three routes side by side.

The Alhambra is where this question gets asked most often and answered worst. The Patronato publishes a great deal about the ticket and very little about when it appears, so the limit of what we could establish is worth stating up front.

What is firm comes from the Patronato's own visitor pages, read on 28 October 2026. A private individual may buy no more than ten tickets a month, a rule the body says exists to protect individual visitors from bulk buyers. The entry time for the Nasrid Palaces is, in its wording, expressly indicated on the ticket, which must be observed, as if it is not, the opportunity to visit them will be lost. The ticket carries a name, cannot be transferred, and is checked against the identity document it was bought with. The general daytime ticket is 22.27 EUR.

What we could not establish is the advance window. The Patronato's booking shop refused automated access on the day we checked, and the pages we could open do not state how far ahead a date is released. Third-party guides give three months and one year with equal confidence, which between them is not a source. We are not going to pick one and date it, because a release window published on a guess is exactly the failure this article is about. If the window matters to your plan, the booking calendar itself is the only thing that will tell you.

Two structural facts do more work than the window anyway. The first is in the matrix above: from 1 April the complex closes at 20:00 rather than 18:00, which adds two hours of half-hourly palace slots to every day, so March can be sold out while April looks empty without any change in demand. The second is that the night visit to the palaces at 12.73 EUR draws on a quota of its own. When the daytime calendar is bare, the night one can still have room, and that is a second pool of tickets, not a trick.

Once you have established that the date is released and the stock is gone, the honest list of moves is short. It is also almost entirely free, which is the part the resellers are quiet about.

Move inside the day before you move the day. At the Alhambra the slots that disappear first are the mid-morning ones, roughly ten until noon, and an afternoon palace entry costs nothing extra while the rest of the hill has no timetable at all. Travellers on the Romanian forums report the same shape at Peles, where our September reading found visitors saying the first and last bands go first.

Then look for a second quota before you look for a second seller. The Alhambra night visit at 12.73 EUR is the clearest case: a separate ticket type with an allocation of its own, not the same pool with a markup on top. The house next door can do the same job. Pelisor at 30 lei has its own 1,500-place ceiling, independent of the 2,000 at Peles, and in Beijing the Treasure and Clock galleries sit behind their own 10 CNY turnstiles. A sold-out headline attraction is not a sold-out site.

Returns are the long shot. Where a body allows cancellation up to the day before, released tickets can come back into the pool, and the Palace Museum permits one cancellation per person per day with the money going back to the card that paid. No body we read advertises returns as a channel, so check without counting on it.

What does not work is buying from somebody promising the date you could not get. At these monuments the ticket carries a name or a document number, and an operator draws on the same release you did. Our guide to when to go, and whether it will even be open takes the seasonal half of this decision further.

Turn up at the gate when it opens. It has been the first line of castle advice for twenty years, and at a timed monument it now does the opposite of what it promises, for the plain reason that everybody has read it.

Where entry is timed, the first slot is not the quiet one, it is the one the whole internet bought. The reports we logged in September describe exactly that: first slots gone earliest at both Peles and the Alhambra, and mid-afternoon the part of the day with room in it. We are putting those forward as traveller accounts and not as published figures, because no body publishes which of its slots fills first.

The published numbers point the same way. At Peles the last band opens at 14:30 and the final individual admission is 16:00. At the Alhambra the complex has no timetable outside the palaces, so a four o'clock palace entry still leaves a whole morning on the hill. And at the Summer Palace the famous early start buys two hours of park and a closed door, because nothing you paid extra for opens before eight.

The two ends of this are worth putting side by side, because nothing about a booking matters more than whether it can be changed, and the practice is not consistent.

Parques de Sintra is the lenient end. Our reading of its pages in September found that a ticket bought online can be rescheduled within a year of the purchase, which is the most generous arrangement in this catalogue. The catch is that it has to be done before the visit, not after: the body states there is no tolerance for lateness and a missed slot is neither exchanged nor refunded, so the year of flexibility expires at the moment your slot does. The conditions of sale page we reached on 28 October is terse to the point of saying almost nothing, so we date that rule to our September reading rather than to today.

Peles is the strict end, and says so in one line: tickets bought for a scheduled visit cannot be rescheduled. Karlstejn is stricter still. Tickets there are neither exchanged nor reclaimed, you have to be at the ticket office fifteen minutes before the time printed on the ticket, and a ticket becomes invalid if you do not reach the castle before your tour begins.

None of that is unreasonable for a building that admits sixteen people every half hour. It simply means that at some of these places the date you choose is the date you have, and that is worth knowing at the moment you choose it, not at the gate.