Plan Your Guggenheim Trip

To plan a Guggenheim trip, make eight decisions in order: which museum, which month, ticket or tour, what you will pay, how you arrive, what goes in your bag, who is coming and how the day runs. Each one has its own page on this site. The order matters because every answer narrows the next: choose Venice and your bag decision is already made for you, because that museum does not admit large items such as bags, backpacks or suitcases.

Three Guggenheim museums are open as of November 3, 2026: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. A fourth, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, is due to open on Friday, December 11, 2026, according to Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism. It has not opened yet and has published no opening hours.

One thing up front: this site is independent. We are not the museums and we are not affiliated with the Guggenheim Foundation. We explain, compare and link to tickets and tours sold by third-party providers, and we say where we checked each fact and when.

Weather decides more than people expect, and it decides differently in each city. We use the 1991-2020 climate normals, not the older figures that some public pages still show. New York is at its best in late spring and early fall. Bilbao is wettest in November, with about 170 mm at the airport station, and driest in July and August, around 52 mm. Venice has a water problem of a different kind: 71 percent of the 296 high-water events of 110 cm or more recorded from 1872 to 2018 fall in October, November and December.

Month by month, with charts for each city, is on Best time to visit.

A ticket gets you in. A tour adds a person, a route and sometimes a crossing of town. Those are different products and the difference is easy to lose in a product title. In Bilbao, for instance, every museum ticket already includes an audio guide, so a guided visit has to offer something the audio guide cannot. Our decision tree asks what you want from the visit and tells you when a plain ticket is the better buy. It also takes apart the phrase "skip the line" and says what it can honestly promise. Read How to choose the right Guggenheim tour.

Prices change with the season, the exchange rate and the museum's calendar, so we keep them in one place and put a date on them. The page covers adult and reduced categories, the New York pay-what-you-wish window, the half-price hours Bilbao offers on the last day of each exhibition, the combined ticket Bilbao sells with the city's Fine Arts Museum, city passes, and what third-party sellers add on top of the museum's own price. Nowhere else on this site will you find a current price. Tickets, discounts, free hours and city passes.

Each museum has a clear public-transport answer, and none of them involves a car. New York is on Fifth Avenue at 88th Street, served by subway lines 4, 5, 6 and Q and the M1 to M4 buses. Bilbao has its own metro exit and tram stop. Venice is reached by vaporetto, at the Accademia or Salute stops. The routes from the airports and stations, written only with facts that do not expire, are on Getting to the Guggenheim in New York, Bilbao and Venice.

Children change the plan more than any other factor, followed by mobility. New York admits strollers, and its ramp is a continuous slope with elevators to the levels. Venice is a house with steps and a garden, and the museum publishes the details of its platform lifts. Bilbao is a large building on several levels, linked by walkways, elevators and stairs. For each museum we collect what the museum itself says about children, strollers, wheelchairs and tactile programs, and we separate it from advice that is ours. The Guggenheim with kids, and accessibility.

The last decision is the sequence. New York works as a morning on Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile, with the Metropolitan Museum six blocks south. Bilbao can fill one day or two, depending on whether you add San Sebastián or the coast. Venice is half a day, and the Biennale, which runs in even-numbered years, changes what else is on offer in the city. We write the days in sequence but without invented minutes. See Guggenheim itineraries, or go straight to the 50 most-asked questions if you already know what you need.

If you only have time for one page before you book: read the one on which museum to visit. Everything else, from the bag to the train, depends on that answer.

They will not tell you a museum is "a must", and they will not promise a price they cannot date. We list the checks we ran, the source we read and the day we read it. Where two sources disagree, we say so and give the one that wins. Where nobody has published an answer, such as the opening hours of Abu Dhabi, we write that nobody has, and we do not guess. The full method is on the editorial policy page.

A last point on Abu Dhabi: the date of December 11, 2026 comes from the emirate's tourism department. The museum's own ticketing page still showed only a loading shell when we looked, so the price figure that circulates in the press has not been confirmed by us. Treat everything about Abu Dhabi as provisional until the museum posts its hours.