Our family has used travel passes in other cities before this trip. I put considerable effort into deciding which pass to purchase for our family. I would say we got our “money’s worth” from this pass, but it was not all the advertising presented it to be.
Knowing we would only have part of a day on the day we arrived, I opted not to “start” the pass until our second day in NYC (a 3-day pass for 4 days in NYC). This pass does not include admission to the Empire State Building as some others do, so that was a separate charge booked elsewhere, and we toured that on our “non-pass” day.
Friday was devoted to the south end of Manhattan. We used the Pass to visit the One World Observatory. We were there at opening, so the line was short. We hoped to squeeze the 9/11 Museum and memorial in before we needed to catch a ferry to the NJ side of the Hudson for our Statue of Liberty pedestal entry (this is not included in the Sightseeing Pass). We had enough time for viewing the memorial, but there are no fast pass privileges at the museum with this pass...so we had to skip that as the line was too long. After our trip to the Statue, we walked from Battery Park to Wall Street, eventually catching a subway back to our hotel for dinner and a play. I had tried to use the “credit” part of our pass for theater tickets, but discovered the price the agent listed by Sightseeing Pass quoted, was about double what I would pay for the same category of seating if I bought them myself from Ticketmaster. (I purchased tix for $100@, the Pass was going to charge $200@).
Saturday we returned to the 9/11 museum at the start of the day, then used the subway to go to the Museum of Natural History (sadly, this pass does not have fast entry here, as some others do). We walked through Central Park to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. About 4:30 we walked to the front entry hoping to catch a HO/HO bus. There were none around. We waited for about 1/2 hour. As we started walking to the subway we noticed one coming down the street, so went back to the pick-up point...only to discover it was completely full. Back to the subway we went! Others at the pick-up point indicated this was typical (long waits and full buses). Be wary of the HO/HO bus as it’s not that useful! We used the Top of the Rock pass that evening, and it was one place where we stood in a shorter line for the first round of ticketing, but then were queued with the masses after that.
Sunday we went to Spyscape as it opened up, this pass does not include the 007 exhibit. No waiting here. When finished, we grabbed an early lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings of Times Square. We were given an abbreviated menu. Choices were a chicken Caesar salad, 5 wings, 8 boneless wings, or a cheeseburger. The last 3 items came with fries, and all included soda and ice cream for dessert. Tax and tip were not included in the “pass”. My sons had selected the RIB boat tour, so we took the subway back to the WTC area and walked to Pier 25. The boat that was about to go out filled with the couple that walked up just before us, so we had to wait for the next one about an hour later. Might have been a highlight of the trip! I suggested we walk to the HO/HO boat pier (Brookfield) a ways south of Pier 25. We got our tickets, and there was some confusion as to exactly where the boat would take us...some attendants seemed to think we would go past the Statue and the Brooklyn Bridge, etc. In reality, they pointed them out, but we basically took a 20-30 minute ride from Brookfield up to around 38th street (Pier78?). We had to wait for over an hour for the boat. It was a 90 degree day, so it was extremely hot. The boat arrived. After standing in a hot queue watching several busloads of people unload at the last minute and be escorted past those of us who’d been standing in line for a minimum of 30 minutes...we were allowed to board. Of course the seats on the top deck were filled by the time we got on. I took a seat in the lower deck thinking at least it would be air conditioned. Not the case. The windows were sealed shut, and they had huge, noisy industrial fans blowing to move the hot air. Unreal!
We hoped to take a nighttime bus tour, but got caught in a downpour as we walked from the pier back to our Times Square hotel. After watching an open-top Sightseeing bus drive past us with a top full of passengers in plastic ponchos...we decided to scrap that plan.
To see lots of attractions, and get value from your pass...use the subway. Since one of the main advertising points of this pass is that you have access to Hop on Hop off privileges for the duration of the pass, you may be disappointed. We paid about $200 for each of our passes. Face value of the attractions/food deals we used according to the pdf version of the tour book was $295. If you throw out the $35 for the ride on the dilapidated Ferry owned by the Grayline Sightseeing company, retail price claimed by the company was $260. From a comment made by an employee at the Museum of Natural History, the museum only gets an “agreed upon” reimbursement (interpret that as Grayline pays them a lesser amount than they would get from people purchasing tickets directly from the museum). We walked about 25 miles, and used the subway a lot, over the 4 days we were in NYC in order to cram as much in as we did.