Is Schloss Linderhof worth visiting? An honest answer

The shape of the visit

Twenty-five minutes, eleven rooms, no photographs. That is the visit inside this building. It works out at about two minutes a room, walking, with no photographs inside.

None of that is a criticism of the tour, which is well run and leaves every five to ten minutes; it is the size of the building. Linderhof is the only one of Ludwig’s three palaces he lived to see finished, and it was finished in 1878 partly because it is small enough to finish. People arriving from Neuschwanstein at lunchtime, which is what most day trips do, have just spent a morning on something at a different scale.

Reviewers split on the interior almost exactly along that line, and both halves are right about what they saw. It is a small building carrying decoration sized for a much larger one. Some people find that extraordinary and some find it airless. Both reactions are common.

Is it worth going inside?

Yes: about eleven euros is the only way into the building and well worth it once you are there, though the park is the bigger part of the day. The tour is the shortest part of the day here. Budget the day around the park and treat the interior as one item on it, and the visit works.

If you are buying in the summer half-year, buy the combination ticket that covers the palace and the grotto. The grotto is the thing here that is nowhere else, and it is a fifteen-minute tour that people remember longer than the twenty-five-minute one.

The thing most worth checking before you book

Not the palace. The booking. One listing says so in its own exclusions: “Admission to Linderhof Palace *usually only an exterior visit”. It is the cheapest way here and that is why, which is a fair trade if the gardens and the drive are what you came for. It is printed on its card, and every other listing either writes the entry into the price or leaves you to buy at the door. If you want to go inside, check the exclusions on the listing with Linderhof in the title.

The listing most people book is the Munich day trip that takes in Neuschwanstein first and Linderhof after it. Read its inclusion list to the end before you assume you are getting in: the castle entry tickets sit there as “Neuschwanstein and Linderhof Castle entry tickets (if option selected)”, which is the listing’s own wording and not the same thing as included. What each listing does about admission works through all of them.

And one listing in this catalogue says “Skip-the-line tickets” and names no building at all, on a trip that visits two palaces. Neither “included” nor “not included” is a true reading of that, and it is worth a message to the operator before you pay rather than an assumption afterwards.

It is what happens when a listing is written for the journey and read for the destination. The cure is reading the inclusion and exclusion lists to the end, and the tickets page does that for all twenty-one of them.

What the trip actually costs you

Two numbers and one sentence about the gap. The palace charges about eleven euros at its own window. The cheapest listing on the platform that will put you in front of the building is about seventy-six. The difference between them covers the drive; the palace tour itself leaves every five minutes, and listings sell the day out rather than a ticket to Linderhof. What is on sale is the day out, and for a lot of people the day out is the right purchase.

If you can reach Oberammergau, the bus and the door ticket are the cheaper way, and a day trip is the convenient alternative. Getting there has it.

• Anyone whose only free day is in the winter half-year and whose reason for coming is the grotto. Consider a summer date. Here is what winter closes.
• Anyone travelling with people who will not enjoy a park, because the park is the visit.
• Anyone choosing between this and Neuschwanstein on a single day and wanting the bigger building. The comparison covers that.
• Anyone booked on a listing whose exclusions say “usually only an exterior visit” who wants to see the interior.

Read next

• How long you actually need.
• The Venus Grotto — the case for the trip.
• Linderhof or Neuschwanstein.
• What reviewers actually wrote.

Frequently asked questions