My first morning in Vienna I did everything wrong. Turned up at Schönbrunn at half eleven with no ticket, queued for fifty minutes in the sun, then shuffled through the state rooms behind three coach parties and came out wondering what all the fuss was about. Went back 2 days later at opening time with a booked slot and had the Great Gallery almost to myself for about 4 minutes. Same palace. Completely different day.
That’s Vienna. The sights themselves are superb, but the gap between a good day here and a frustrating one comes down to timing, a bit of pre-booking, and knowing which famous thing is actually worth your afternoon. I’ve been back 3 times now, in blazing August heat and in that grey, drizzly March damp where the coffee houses earn their keep. This is the list I’d give a mate flying in on Friday.
Prices below are a guide and vary by season, ticket type and demand. Pounds and dollars are rough conversions from the euro price.
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Things to Do in Vienna: Quick Facts
The Top 10 at a glance
1. Schönbrunn Palace, done the early way
The Habsburgs’ summer place, all 1,441 rooms of it, sitting in gardens that climb to a hilltop colonnade called the Gloriette. It is the single most visited thing in Austria and you can feel that on a July afternoon.
Two main tickets. The Imperial Tour gets you about 22 rooms. The Grand Tour adds Maria Theresa’s private quarters, including the Millions Room with its rosewood panelling, and honestly that’s the half worth paying for. Audio guide comes free with both. Allow an hour inside, then another 90 minutes for the gardens, which cost nothing at all.
Walk up to the Gloriette. Everyone photographs it from the bottom, far fewer bother with the climb, and the view back down over the palace and the city behind it is the shot people think they’re getting from the parterre. It takes about 15 minutes uphill on a gravel path.
- Book a timed slot online. Morning slots go first in summer.
- U4 to Schönbrunn, then a five minute walk. Don’t drive, parking is a faff.
- The maze, Gloriette platform and Crown Prince Garden come as a combined garden ticket if you want the lot.
Where to Stay in Vienna
2. Climb the Steffl at St Stephen's Cathedral
Stephansdom is the building Vienna uses as its own logo, and the roof is the reason why. Around 230,000 glazed tiles laid in zigzags, with a double headed eagle picked out on the south side. You can wander into the back of the nave for free and get a proper sense of the scale from there.
The south tower is the one to climb. 343 steps up a narrow spiral staircase to a watchman’s chamber at 72 metres, with windows on all four sides. It’s single file and there’s no bailing out halfway, so commit or don’t start. Restoration work moves around the building and can block one window’s view, which is mildly annoying but never ruins it.
Can’t face the stairs? The north tower has a lift and puts you next to the Pummerin, the huge bell that rings in the new year. Lower, less dramatic, but you get a much better look at those roof tiles.
3. Standing tickets at the State Opera
This is my favourite thing in the whole city and it costs less than a round of drinks. The Wiener Staatsoper sells several hundred standing places for every performance, on the day only, from ten in the morning. Three tiers: balcony, gallery, and the ground floor spot behind the seats, which has the best sound and sightline of the lot.
Each standing place has its own little subtitle screen, so you’re not lost. Bring a scarf to tie to the rail and mark your spot, that’s the local trick and nobody will look at you funny. The season runs autumn through to early summer, with the house dark in high summer.
You can buy tickets online at ten on the day of the performance, or queue at the Stehplatz box office on the Operngasse side. The online route is easier but the popular nights go in minutes. If it’s sold out, the daytime guided tour of the building is a decent consolation prize.
Money saver: A standing ticket runs about £11 to £16 (€13 to €18, $15 to $21). Seats for the same performance can be ten times that. You are in the same room hearing the same orchestra.
4. An afternoon in a proper coffee house
Viennese coffee house culture is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list, which sounds pompous until you’ve actually sat in one. The deal is simple: you buy one coffee, it comes on a small silver tray with a glass of tap water, and then nobody bothers you for three hours. Newspapers on wooden rods. Marble tables. Waiters in waistcoats who have seen it all.
Café Central is the famous one, with the vaulted ceilings and the queue out the door. Worth doing once, go at opening or after four to skip the wait. Café Sperl is where I’d actually spend an afternoon, all worn velvet and billiard tables, and it’s barely changed in a century. Café Hawelka is smaller, darker, scruffier and has proper character.
Order a Melange if you want something like a flat white, an Einspänner if you want a strong black under a cap of whipped cream. And get the Apfelstrudel over the Sachertorte. I’ll defend that to anyone. The Sachertorte is drier than people expect and mostly you’re paying for the name.
Gear we actually travel with
Passport holders, packing cubes, travel wallets. Stuff that earns its place in the bag.
Browse the shopWhat the big sights actually cost
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| Sight | Ticket | Euro | Pounds / Dollars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schönbrunn Palace | Grand Tour, 40 rooms | €38 | £33 / $44 |
| Schönbrunn Palace | Imperial Tour, 22 rooms | €28 | £24 / $33 |
| Schönbrunn gardens | Main parterre and paths | Free | Free |
| St Stephen’s Cathedral | South tower climb | about €8 | £7 / $9 |
| State Opera | Standing place, day of show | €13 to €18 | £11 to £16 / $15 to $21 |
| Upper Belvedere | Permanent collection | around €18 | £15 / $21 |
| Giant Ferris Wheel | One rotation, 12 to 15 mins | around €14.50 | £12.50 / $17 |
| Sisi Museum and Imperial Apartments | Single ticket, audio guide included | €20 | £17 / $23 |
| Kunsthistorisches Museum | Day admission | €20 to €22 | £17 to £19 / $23 to $26 |
Add it all up and you’re looking at real money, which is why the pass question comes up so often. Short answer further down.
5. The Belvedere, and standing in front of The Kiss
Two baroque palaces facing each other across a formal garden, built for Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Upper Belvedere is the one you want. It holds the largest collection of Klimt paintings anywhere, and The Kiss hangs in a room of its own on the first floor.
I’ll be straight with you: that room is a scrum. People queue to get a phone in front of it. My advice is to look at it properly for two minutes, take one photo if you must, then go and enjoy the rest, because the Schiele and Kokoschka rooms nearby are quieter and, to my eye, more interesting. The Waldmüller landscapes too.
The gardens between the two palaces are free and the view from the upper terrace down to the city, with Stephansdom poking up in the distance, is one of Vienna’s best and costs nothing.
- Book online, it’s usually a couple of euros cheaper than at the desk.
- Tram D drops you at the palace gates from the Ringstrasse.
- Allow two hours for the Upper Belvedere. The Lower one holds temporary shows, so check what’s on before paying extra.
Recommended Tours & Tickets
6. The Riesenrad and a wander round the Prater
Built in 1897 for the emperor’s golden jubilee, the Giant Ferris Wheel is the oldest one still turning anywhere in the world. Fifteen red wooden gondolas, a slow 12 to 15 minute rotation, and a view that takes in the Danube, the old town and the Vienna Woods on a clear day.
Is it a bit touristy? Yes. Do it anyway, ideally at dusk when the city switches its lights on partway round. Some of the gondolas are fitted out as tiny dining rooms if you fancy dinner mid air, but those need booking well ahead.
The wheel sits at the gates of the Prater, which is a free funfair wrapped around an enormous public park. Entry costs nothing, you pay per ride. Beyond the noisy bit, the Hauptallee is a dead straight, tree lined avenue running about four kilometres, and on a Sunday it’s full of Viennese families, joggers and dogs. That’s the part most visitors never see.
7. Eat your way along the Naschmarkt
Vienna’s long market strip, running about a kilometre and a half along the Wienzeile. The first stretch nearest Karlsplatz is the touristy end, all restaurant terraces with menus in five languages and prices to match. Keep walking. The further out you go, the more it turns into an actual food market where locals buy their olives, cheese and Turkish bread.
My routine: grab a falafel or a plate of grilled fish somewhere past the halfway point, then stock up on nuts, dried fruit and a bottle of Grüner Veltliner for later. The vinegar and oil stalls do tasting flights, which is more fun than it sounds.
On a Saturday there’s a flea market at the far end. Proper jumble, from decent Biedermeier furniture down to somebody’s old cassette collection. It gets going early and thins out by mid afternoon.
8. The Hofburg, Sisi and the crown jewels
The Habsburgs’ winter residence, a sprawl of courtyards and wings in the middle of town that grew for 600 years and never quite finished. It’s still the working seat of the Austrian president, so parts are off limits, but three bits are open and they’re very different from each other.
The Sisi Museum plus the Imperial Apartments is the popular combined ticket. You walk through roughly two dozen genuine rooms, including Franz Joseph’s monastic iron bed and Elisabeth’s gymnastics rings, and the museum does a decent job of pulling apart the Sisi myth rather than selling it to you.
The Imperial Treasury is the one I’d push you towards if you only pick one. Eight hundred years of Habsburg hoarding, including the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. It’s a separate ticket and it’s usually much quieter than the Sisi route, which tells you something about how people choose.
9. Ride the Ring on a normal tram
Here’s a free-ish one that nobody tells you about. The Ringstrasse is the boulevard that replaced the old city walls, and it’s lined with the Opera, the Parliament, the Rathaus, the Burgtheater, the university and the twin museums. Tourist trams charge a premium to show you it.
Trams 1 and 2 cover most of the same loop as ordinary public transport, so one validated ticket does it. Get on, grab a window, ride half the circle on the 1, hop across and take the 2 back. Forty minutes, no commentary, and you’ve seen the lot. Do it on your first evening to get your bearings.
The Rathaus is the neo-Gothic showstopper, and the square in front of it is used all year for markets, film screenings and an ice rink in the colder months. Worth a stop rather than just a glance from the window.
10. The MuseumsQuartier, and picking one museum
A former imperial stables turned into one of the bigger cultural complexes in Europe, with the Leopold Museum, the modern art MUMOK and a courtyard full of those odd curvy benches people sprawl on all summer. The courtyard is free and it’s a lovely place to sit with a beer in the evening.
Pick one museum, not three. The Leopold has the world’s biggest Egon Schiele collection, which is unsettling and brilliant and takes about 90 minutes. MUMOK is for you if contemporary art is your thing and will bore you rigid if it isn’t.
Just across the road sit the Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches museums, twins facing each other across Maria-Theresien-Platz. The Kunsthistorisches holds the Bruegel collection, the largest anywhere, and the café under the dome is worth the entry on its own.
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| Sight | How long to allow | Best time to go | Book ahead? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schönbrunn | Half a day with gardens | First slot of the morning | Yes, always |
| St Stephen’s Cathedral | 1 to 2 hours | Early morning, before the square fills | No, walk up |
| State Opera | 3 to 4 hours for a performance | Buy at 10am, queue from 5pm | Same day only |
| Upper Belvedere | 2 hours | Weekday, first or last hour | Yes, timed entry |
| Giant Ferris Wheel | 45 minutes including queue | Sunset, or opening on a weekday | Helps in summer |
| Naschmarkt | 1 to 2 hours | Late morning, Saturday for the flea market | No |
| Hofburg and Treasury | 2 to 3 hours for both | Afternoon, once the morning rush thins | Yes for Sisi, no for Treasury |
| MuseumsQuartier | 90 minutes per museum | Thursday evening late opening | Rarely needed |
Getting around, and which ticket to buy
The transport here is one of the best systems in Europe and it’s a big part of why Vienna feels easy. Five U-Bahn lines, a dense tram network and buses to fill the gaps, all on one ticket. No barriers at most stations, it runs on trust and spot checks, and the fine for chancing it is considerably more than the fare.
Buy in the WienMobil app if you can. Digital tickets come in around five per cent cheaper than the paper ones from the machine. And note that the old 48 and 72 hour tickets have been scrapped, which catches out a lot of people working from older guides. For two or three days you now buy two 24 hour tickets or jump straight to the weekly.
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| Ticket | Euro | Pounds / Dollars | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single journey | €3.20 (€3 in the app) | £2.75 / $3.70 | One or two hops a day |
| 24 hours | around €10 | £8.60 / $11.60 | Three or more rides in a day |
| 7 day Vienna ticket | around €29 | £25 / $34 | Any stay of three nights or more |
| Vienna City Card | from around €19 | from £16 / $22 | Only if you’ll use several discounts |
| Airport, S7 suburban train | around €4.60 | £4 / $5.30 | Light bags, no rush |
| Airport, City Airport Train | around €14 one way | £12 / $16 | Speed and a guaranteed seat |
With heavy bags, late flights or a family in tow, a fixed-price airport transfer is worth the extra, and you skip the escalator wrestling match at Wien Mitte. Landing without roaming sorted is the other classic mistake, and a prepaid eSIM saves the usual airport panic about data charges.
What a day in Vienna costs
Vienna is not cheap, but it’s better value than Paris or Zurich and the free stuff is properly good. Gardens, churches, the Prater, the Danube island, most of the best walks. Here’s roughly what a day works out at per person.
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| Style | Bed | Food and drink | Sights and transport | Daily total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shoestring | £25 / €29 / $34 | £18 / €21 / $24 | £15 / €17 / $20 | £58 / €67 / $78 |
| Mid range | £55 / €64 / $74 | £35 / €41 / $47 | £25 / €29 / $34 | £115 / €134 / $155 |
| Treat yourself | £130 / €151 / $175 | £70 / €81 / $94 | £45 / €52 / $60 | £245 / €284 / $329 |
The pass question, since everyone asks. A sightseeing pass only pays off if you’re doing three or more paid attractions a day, every day. Most people don’t, because Vienna’s best hours are spent sitting in a café or walking the Ring. Work out your actual list first, add it up, then decide. Our travel budget calculator does the maths for you if you can’t be bothered.
Where to base yourself
The 1st district puts you inside the Ring with everything on your doorstep, and you’ll pay for the privilege. It’s also quiet at night in a slightly dead way, since most residents left decades ago.
My preference is the 7th, Neubau, just outside the Ring behind the MuseumsQuartier. Independent shops, decent restaurants, nice bars, and you can walk into the centre in ten minutes. The 4th (Wieden) is similar in feel and handy for the Naschmarkt and Karlsplatz. The 2nd, Leopoldstadt, is cheaper, has the Prater on its doorstep and a good food scene, and is two U-Bahn stops from the middle.
Whatever district you pick, check the tram or U-Bahn stop distance before you book. A place that looks central on a map but sits a 15 minute walk from any line will annoy you by day two. Plenty of good options across all of these on Booking.com, and prices swing hard around Christmas market season and the ball season.
Putting the 10 together
Three days does it comfortably. Day one: Ring tram loop, Stephansdom and the tower, coffee house, opera in the evening. Day two: Schönbrunn first thing, Naschmarkt for lunch, Belvedere in the afternoon. Day three: Hofburg and the Treasury, MuseumsQuartier, then the Prater and the wheel at dusk.
Two days? Drop the MuseumsQuartier and pick either Schönbrunn or the Hofburg, not both. They’re similar experiences and doing the pair back to back gives you imperial fatigue by about three in the afternoon.
For a deeper dive on the city as a whole, the full Vienna travel guide covers food, neighbourhoods and the stuff that doesn’t fit a top ten. And everything Austrian we’ve written lives in the Austria hub, from Hallstatt to Salzburg and Innsbruck.
Before You Go
Book Schönbrunn and the Belvedere the moment you know your dates. Get the WienMobil app on your phone. Learn to say Melange. That’s about 80 per cent of the prep sorted.
The rest is the bit I like best about this city: you can plan it tightly and then throw the plan out, sit in a café for three hours watching the rain, and still feel like you got Vienna right. Not many places let you do that.
Planning the wider trip? Start with the Austria hub, check what you need to enter with our entry requirement checker, and if you want every one of my pins in one place, the Vienna Google Maps legend drops them straight onto your phone.
FAQs
How many days do you need in Vienna?
Three full days covers the main ten without rushing, with a bit of café time built in. Two works if you cut one palace and stay inside the Ring. Four or five lets you add the wine taverns, the cemetery and a day trip out to the Wachau valley or across to Bratislava, which is an hour away by boat or train.
Is Vienna expensive compared to other European capitals?
Mid table. Dearer than Prague or Budapest, noticeably cheaper than Zurich, Copenhagen or central Paris. Attraction tickets are the big cost, at £15 to £33 (€18 to €38, $21 to $44) a pop for the headline sights. Transport, beer and everyday food are all reasonable, and the free things are excellent.
Do I need to book Vienna attractions in advance?
For Schönbrunn and the Belvedere, yes, both run timed entry and sell out in peak months. For Stephansdom, the Treasury and most museums you can turn up. Opera standing tickets are day of performance only, so there’s nothing to book ahead there.
What's the best area to stay in Vienna?
The 7th district, Neubau, for character and walkability just outside the Ring. The 1st if you want everything on the doorstep and don’t mind the price. The 2nd, Leopoldstadt, for better value with the Prater nearby. All three keep you within about fifteen minutes of the main sights.
Is Vienna walkable, or do I need public transport?
The historic centre is easily walkable, roughly 25 minutes from one side of the Ring to the other. You’ll want transport for Schönbrunn, the Prater, the Belvedere and anywhere in the outer districts. A weekly ticket at around £25 (€29, $34) covers the lot and takes the decision out of it.
Travel Hubs
Recommended Websites and Resources:
- Flights: Find the best deals on Trip.com
- Hotels: Best rates on Booking.com · Best hostels on HostelWorld · Ratings and bargains on TripAdvisor
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- Travel insurance: EKTA for worldwide cover · AirHelp for flight delay compensation
- Activities: Tours and skip-the-line tickets on GetYourGuide · Instant mobile tickets on Tiqets
- Trains: Most affordable trains on Trainline · Rail passes on Rail Europe
- Travel eSIMs: Use your mobile phone anywhere worldwide with Airalo
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