The Paris Museum Pass is a great way to save both money and time. Offering admission to more than forty museums and monuments in Paris, and another twenty in the Paris region, the Paris Museum Pass is a wonderful convenience.

You can buy a Paris Museum Pass for two, four, or six days. To make it pay for itself, you'll want to go to two or three museums or monuments a day.

(Note that the pass design changes periodically. The current version has a vertical Mona Lisa and a reddish background.)

As important as saving money is the convenience. Some museums have a separate entrance for Paris Museum Pass holders. Others allow you to coupe file or cut in line, bypassing the ticket counter.

I used a two-day Paris Museum Pass to visit the Louvre, the Orangerie, the Pompidou, the Guimet, and a couple other smaller museums. I even went to the Louvre two days in a row, since there's so much to see and I needed time to absorb it all.

The Paris Museum Pass also covers a number of important monuments: the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon, the Towers of Notre Dame, and the Sainte-Chapelle are among those that accept the Pass. You can even use it to visit the Paris sewer system at the Musée des Égouts de Paris!

So how do you buy the Paris Museum Pass? The easiest way is to buy it at any of the participating museums/monuments (choose one of the smaller, less crowded ones to save time. I got mine at the Delacroix Museum). It's also available at outlets at Charles DeGaulle Airport, at FNAC stores, or on-line, if you have time before your trip.

The Pass also covers about 20 museums/monuments outside of the city. The best known are the Château de Versailles, the Château de Fontainebleau, and the Château de Vincennes. Versailles and Fontainebleau are both day trips, so you'll need to decide if you want to spend one of your Paris Museum Pass days on an excursion or concentrate on seeing more museums in Paris.

In some places you still have to wait in line (and you have to go through security at many museums, which can take time). But the Paris Museum Pass can help you spend less time waiting and more time enjoying the wonderful treasures of many of Paris's top museums.

Paris Museum Pass