Linderhof tickets: what the door charges, and what eighteen listings do about it

What the palace charges at its own window

These are the Bavarian Palace Administration’s published rates, and this table is one of only three places on this page where you will find an exact figure. I have copied the rows rather than rounded them, because the row you are buying is the thing people get wrong at the desk: the palace and the grotto are two tickets, not one, and the cheaper of the two is shut for half the year.

Three rows are worth reading twice. The combination ticket is cheaper than the two separate tickets by about two euros, which is a small saving and a real one if you were going to do both anyway. The reduced palace rate is not far under the adult one, so if you are not sure you qualify, budget for the adult rate and be pleasantly surprised. And the last row is the one people are most often surprised by in the good direction: the Moroccan House, Hunding’s Hut and the Hermitage of Gurnemanz take no ticket at all, so the walk round the grounds costs nothing. The Royal Lodge is the one exception among the park buildings and it has its own small ticket, in the row above.

And one line about what the ticket does not let you do, because a page taking an inventory of what eleven euros buys should say it: the palace ticket admits you to a guided tour and does not permit you to photograph or film what it admits you to. The same holds in the Venus Grotto and in the Royal Lodge. Outside, in the park, photography for your own use is free. Why that changes how you should budget your time is on the how-long page.

Both grotto rows say summer, and they mean it. The Venus Grotto ticket and the combination ticket exist between the middle of April and the middle of October and do not exist outside that. In the winter half-year the palace is the ticket, with the Royal Lodge exhibition open on a narrower timetable beside it. What is actually open when is set out here, and it is the single most useful thing to check before you set a date.

Why there is no booking fee on top of it

One row that is not in the table, because it is an absence rather than a charge. Linderhof’s ticket carries no service or reservation fee. Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau both do, and the reason is ownership rather than policy: Linderhof belongs to the Free State of Bavaria and is sold by the Bavarian Palace Administration at its own desk, while Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau are both ticketed through the Hohenschwangau ticket centre — Hohenschwangau because it is not a state property at all. Under the settlement of 1923 between the Free State and the House of Wittelsbach, Neuschwanstein, Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee went to the state; Hohenschwangau went to the family foundation and is still its property.

That is a fact about who owns what, and it is not a criticism of anybody. It does mean the figure in the table at the top of this page is the whole figure, which is not true of the castle everybody pairs this one with. Who owns Linderhof, and what the 1923 settlement did, is here, and the three door prices side by side are here.

The platform does not sell that ticket, and this is a measurement rather than a complaint

Here is the thing this whole site was built to say plainly. The discovery pass read a hundred and twenty-seven activities across ten Bavarian hubs on the platform, including all twenty-four listings sitting on Linderhof’s own page. Eight of those titles are shaped like an entry ticket — they carry the word ticket, entry, admission, skip-the-line or fast-track. Seven of the eight are Neuschwanstein and the last one is a Munich hop-on hop-off bus pass. Not one of them is a ticket to Linderhof.

Nobody is hiding anything. The palace administration sells its own admission at its own window and does not wholesale it, and what the platform sells for this valley is the day out that ends here. That is a different product with a different price, and the two figures belong side by side rather than divided into each other. About eleven euros at the window. On the platform it is not one figure but three, and they mean different things, so here they are separately rather than collapsed into a headline: the cheapest listing that names Linderhof at all is about seventy euros, and its own exclusions say you stay outside; the cheapest whose page offers you the ticket is about seventy-six euros, and there the ticket sits behind “(if option selected)”; the cheapest that describes the palace visit with nothing attached to it is about two hundred euros. Each of those is a different purchase. The difference between any of them and the door is the drive, which is worth what it is worth to you. Why the drive is the product is the whole of the getting-there page.

What each of the eighteen Linderhof listings does about admission

Eighteen listings in this catalogue name Linderhof in their title. Seventeen of them were read off the palace’s own page on the platform and the one other off Oberammergau’s. The table below sorts them by the only question a ticket-buyer has, and the right-hand column is the point of it: those are the listings’ own sentences, copied out of their own inclusion and exclusion lists and labelled with which list each one came from. Nothing there is a paraphrase.

Read as a single block of text, the way most summaries present these pages, an exclusion looks exactly like a promise. That is a layout rather than an intention, and it is why this site reads the two lists separately and prints the label above each quotation.

The two that state the entry

t211524 is the unambiguous one. Its inclusions carry “Tickets for Neuschwanstein and Linderhof Castles” and then, separately, “Entry/admission - Linderhof Palace”, with nothing after either line. It is a private tour out of Füssen rather than Munich, listed at about four hundred euros, and it carries 5.0 from 16 ratings — a base too small to tell you much, which is why this page prints it next to the average every time.

t1213649 is the cheaper one and the wording is worth slowing down on. Its inclusions read “Transport to Linderhof Palace”, “Guided palace visit at Linderhof Palace” and “Free time to explore gardens, fountains, terraces, and surrounding landscape”. A guided palace visit is exactly the product the window sells, since a guided tour is the only way into this building at all — but the listing never uses the words ticket or admission about Linderhof, and I am telling you that is my reading of the line rather than the line itself. It is listed at about two hundred euros, which makes it the cheapest listing here with the palace visit written flat, and it carries 5.0 from 11 ratings. Read its exclusions as well: the Venus Grotto is named there as an optional extra, so the grotto is a separate ticket on this trip exactly as it is at the door.

The two that put a condition after it

These two are the reason the brief for this site says to read the brackets. Both of them list the Linderhof ticket as included. Both of them then qualify it, in their own words, and the words are not the same.

t1753 is the flagship and the most-rated thing in this catalogue by a distance: 16,467 ratings at 4.6, which is 90 % of every rating across all eighteen listings that name this palace. Its third inclusion reads “Neuschwanstein and Linderhof Castle entry tickets (if option selected)”. The tickets are a box you tick during booking, not something the headline price already contains, and the headline price is the about-seventy-six-euro figure that gets quoted everywhere.

t1195301 uses two different words: “Entrance ticket to Linderhof Palace (if available)”. That is not boilerplate on this palace. Tours leave every five to ten minutes with a maximum of forty people to a slot, so availability at the hour a private car happens to arrive is a real question to ask before you pay about four hundred euros for the day. It carries 5.0 from 2 ratings.

That left-hand column is the one to read to the end. Two of its five lines carry a condition, and one of the two is the entry to both palaces. Nothing on the right-hand side is a surprise: food and lunch. If you book this one, read your own booking summary back before you travel and check that the entry tickets are named in it.

The one that says, in its own exclusions, that you do not go inside

This is the most useful line in the whole catalogue and it is eight words long. t1101124 puts Linderhof in its title and then lists, under what is not included: “Admission to Linderhof Palace *usually only an exterior visit”. A reader planning to see the Hall of Mirrors, booking a listing with Linderhof in the name, will not learn that anywhere else on the page.

Note the word “usually”, and note that I am leaving it where the listing put it. It does not mean always and this site does not upgrade it. What it means in practice is that you should assume the outside and be delighted if you get the inside.

Two of its own reviewers describe exactly that. One, at four stars, wrote: “Very good communication with the guide. The route was excellent. I would like to visit the interior of Linderhof.” Another, also at four stars, was blunter: “My suggestion would be to skip Linderhof completely. We didn’t even go inside, and it wasn’t worth spending anytime there.” I think she is wrong about the palace and completely right about her own day, and the difference between those two sentences is a ticket she did not have. The listing shows 3.8 from 72 ratings, the lowest average in this catalogue.

A second listing carries the identical sentence, word for word, and it is not in the eighteen above because its title is about somewhere else entirely: t1089099, a Neuschwanstein and Königssee day, sitting on Linderhof’s own page on the platform, with Linderhof appearing once in its exclusions in those same eight words. It has no rating and no written review at all. If you are scrolling the palace’s page looking for a way in, that is a listing to know the shape of.

The one that mentions tickets and names no building

t91965 is the second-most-rated listing here, 4.8 from 1,673 ratings, and its inclusion list opens with two words and no noun: “Skip-the-line tickets”. The tour visits two palaces. Neither “included” nor “not included” is a true summary of that line, so this site says what is actually on the page and stops. It is listed at a little under two hundred euros, and a question to the operator before you pay it seems fair to everybody: which building are the skip-the-line tickets for?

Two listings file a “not included” sentence inside the included list

Read t882180’s inclusion list to the end. The second bullet of three under included says: “Tickets for the castles and palaces tour are NOT included in the price and must be purchased separately.” Somebody typed a caveat into the box where the promises go. That is a typing mistake in a form, and I want to be careful about how it is presented, because it is evidence for something quite dry: this site reads inclusion and exclusion off the structure of the page rather than off a paragraph of running text, and this listing is why that distinction is not pedantry.

It happens twice. t969207 does the same thing in its own way: its third inclusion, the last of three, reads “Skip the line service. We organise tickets. Ticket prices are not included in the price”. Same box, same shape, different words. Both listings also cross entrance fees out in their exclusion lists, so on both of them the two lists agree once you have read them both.

I am printing which bullet because I got it wrong first. I wrote “the third bullet” for the first of those two from memory of the brief, and it is the second of three. The positions come out of the catalogue now rather than out of anybody’s counting.

Three listings quote a Linderhof entrance fee, and they quote three different numbers

This is the part of the catalogue I would most like a reader to take away, and the lesson at the end of it is a shrug rather than an accusation. Three listings state a Linderhof entrance fee in their own text. They do not agree with each other, and one of the three agrees with the window.

Nobody here is lying to you. A number typed into a listing years ago stays typed until somebody edits it, and prices go up. t23221 is the oldest of the three by the look of it, and its own written reviews go back to 2015. t1348544 is the only one in the catalogue that matches, and it is also a listing with no ratings at all and not one written review, so the fare is the only thing about it anybody can check.

The middle figure has a curiosity attached to it. Ten euros is not a made-up number: it is the palace’s current reduced rate, sitting one row under the adult one in the table at the top of this page. I am noting that and building nothing on it. The same listing also says children up to 18 pay a reduced Linderhof reservation fee of about two and a half euros, where the palace admits under-18s free. Both statements are printed exactly as they stand in the tables on this page — the listing’s own line is in the right-hand column above and the palace’s rate is at the top of the page. Check the fare at the window rather than in the listing, and take a card and some cash.

One boundary worth drawing. A few other listings price “castle admission” without saying which castle — one crosses out “Castle Admission Tickets” and gives an adult figure covering a day that takes in two buildings. Those are not counted among the three, because a figure that does not name Linderhof is not a quotation of Linderhof’s fare.

How to buy the ticket, and whether you can buy it in advance

You buy it at the ticket desk at Linderhof, on the day, for a tour time the desk gives you. The palace runs on timed guided tours, tours leave every five to ten minutes, and each one takes a maximum of forty people. In practice, on a normal summer weekday, the wait between buying and walking in is short. In August, or on a Sunday in the school holidays, it is not always short, and the honest advice is to arrive earlier in the day rather than to arrive with a plan.

If your ticket comes through a tour, one of that tour’s own reviewers described the mechanics better than I can. On the Linderhof and Oberammergau day, a passenger wrote that their guide “went out of his way - by running ahead of a bus group - to buy our tickets to tour the castle and newly renovated grotto at Linderhof”. That is what a good guide does with a timed-entry palace, and it is a real part of what a tour buys. A passenger on another listing described the other side of it: “I wished it was a little clearer that our tickets for castle entry were timed. We thought we just had to pick them up by a certain time, not realizing they wouldn’t even let us in.”

And one reviewer on a private listing put the whole of this page into a sentence: “It wasn’t clear if the tickets to the castle were included on initial description.” That is the problem. The table above is the answer to it for eighteen listings at once.

The three listings worth having open while you decide

The one everybody books, the cheapest one with the palace visit written flat, and the one that tells you in its own exclusions that you will be looking at the building from the outside.

The one everybody books

From Munich: Neuschwanstein & Linderhof Castle Full-Day Trip

★ 4.6 · 16,467 ratings

· a coach or minibus day out of Munich or Füssen · palace entry only on some options

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Cheapest with entry stated

Füssen: Neuschwanstein & Linderhof Palace Day Trip

★ 5.0 · 11 ratings

· a coach or minibus day out of Munich or Füssen · palace entry stated

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You see it from outside

Munich: Neuschwanstein, Linderhof Group or Private Tour

★ 3.8 · 72 ratings

· a coach or minibus day out of Munich or Füssen · outside only — you do not go in

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