How it works

How does it work, how do I get my tickets?

Any tickets or tours that are marked like this will typically be confirmed within minutes, during office hours:

Rapid confirmation.

We would dearly love to have all products working like this, but some still need to be confirmed locally, as, especially with smaller destinations or with certain very popular tours, a final confirmation of availability must be carried out here in Italy. Read on below for some more detail.

(Please note that the information on this page does not apply to tickets for the Verona Opera Festival - please click here for information on these tickets.)

Tickitaly are licensed advance reservation agents for ticket booking for Italian state museums and popular destinations across Italy. For many of these, advance reservation is compulsory - for those where it isn't, you may well face long, long queues. For example, when visiting the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, figure on an hour or two standing in the queue, and it's not unheard of for people to be queuing for three or four hours! Much the same holds true for the Vatican.

Why risk any of this? Several hours will enable you to do some serious wandering around the city you're visiting, so why waste any of that time by standing in a queue? (You can see comments from a selection of past clients on this page, and we have an FAQ here).

What do I need to do?

To reserve tickets with tickitaly.com, just fill out the booking form, give us a first - and sometimes second - preference for date and time (dates are in European day-month-year format), supply us with credit card details, and we'll do the rest. We have a page here that covers typical costs and the advantages of using us for your bookings.

As soon as the order is placed you'll be given login details to a secure 'order status' page from where you'll be able to print out or download your vouchers once we have confirmed availability. Print your voucher (many places now accept e-vouchers, we'll show this in the description), take it with you to the venue and present it at the ticket desk ... they will swap it for your entry ticket. As simple as that!

The actual booking process is carried out on a Secure Server, and payments are handled by Stripe Secure Online Payments. You are advised to book as far in advance as is possible (we'd recommend at least 40 days), and to supply us with alternative dates/times should your first preference not prove possible. Provided that you reserve well in advance, it should normally be possible to use your first preference.

Stripe and card payments

You will be charged absolutely nothing until we have confirmed your reservation but please note that some banks appear to show a charge when, in fact, it is just a hold on your card, much like with car-hire companies.

To explain that more fully, when you supply your card details during checkout the amount is passed to Stripe who carry out a check and pre-authorise the payment, effectively putting the amount on hold. When we confirm the order then - and only then - we actually charge/debit the amount of the confirmed order. If the order is not confirmed then the 'hold' is released.

With some cards/banks we have seen that the 'hold' amount actually shows as a debit, in error. What should happen, and this is standard with Stripe, is that the hold amount is invisible, only showing up as a debit when the transaction is 'captured' (confirmed by us).

What happens then?

If you've ordered 'Rapid confirmation' tickets then we typically process such orders in under 10 minutes, during office hours. For other products, ones that require local confirmation, we will ordinarily get back to you on the same day as ordering during office hours.

You'll be sent an email letting you know that your vouchers are ready to be printed - many of our tickets and tours are now perfectly valid as e-tickets and we'll let you know during the order process when and if you have to print them out; you may also login at any time to your order status page to see if the vouchers are ready.

Please contact tickets@tickitaly.com if this does not happen. Our general contact page is here, and we have a page here that should answer all your questions about how long you need to wait to get your vouchers, and how close to the date of your visit you may book.

Please note:

If you are booking for several different venues** then you'll be printing out one voucher for each different visit (each having different confirmation codes), and you'll be surrendering the voucher at the door. Once you've logged in to print out your vouchers then our system will automatically seperate your vouchers and print them one venue per page.

Please ensure that ALL of your vouchers print out correctly (ensure that your printer is loaded with paper, for example). The login will work right up until the time of your visit, so there's plenty of opportunity to access and print your vouchers as many times as you like.

** If you are ordering tickets for the Verona Opera Festival then these tickets must not be ordered along with any other type of ticket - they must be ordered as a standalone order. See this page for booking details for the opera at Verona.

Notes:

You must present yourself at the venue at the time specified on your booking voucher - admittance will not be granted at other times. For this reason, if you're planning on seeing, say, the Accademia and the Uffizi on the same day, please be sure to leave at least a couple of hours between visits.

Please also be prepared to show some ID - It is sometimes difficult for Italian officials to understand that not all countries require their citizens to carry ID cards, if indeed they are issued in said countries at all. You will often find that nothing other than a Passport or Driving Licence (with photograph) will suffice.

No queuing to buy tickets, no uncertainty, no time wasted. Below you'll find links that will provide specific opening and closing times, plus entrance procedures, for all of our venues. You'll also find details of our cancellation policy.

Cancellation and refund policy

Please be careful when entering details on the booking form - from the moment the booking form has been submitted it will not be possible to make ANY refunds, so please ensure that the dates are accurate and that you have supplied a valid email address. Our offices are closed on Saturday afternoon and Sundays as well as important national holidays. We'll reply immediately upon our return to work. If you do not receive any sort of reply from us within three working days it should be assumed that we have an incorrect email address or your ISP/Server is somehow blocking our reply via a filter. Again, please contact us if you hear nothing within three working days.

We use a Secure Server to process your order, but the charge to your card is not immediate. Only when we have confirmed a reservation with the gallery(ies) will we notify you, and a charge will be made to your card to Renting In Italy Srl., the parent company of tickitaly.com. You may view the full terms and conditions on this page.