About Céline Marchand, and what this site is for

Céline MarchandFormer Palais Garnier usher & visits guide — 9th arrondissement, Paris

The two facts this site is built on

First: you cannot buy a visit ticket at the door. The Opéra’s own rule, on its own site, is that online booking is mandatory and no visit tickets are sold on site — and still, every morning, people queue at the Rue Scribe corner expecting a window. Second: no ticket, official or tour, guarantees the auditorium, because rehearsals close it frequently and without notice. I spent eleven seasons on the working side of those doors, and I can tell you the closures are exactly as unpredictable as the Opéra says they are. Those two truths live at why you can’t just walk in and hours and closures, and every other page on this site assumes you know them.

Why I keep pointing at the cheap ticket

The Opéra sells its own self-guided visit ticket at operadeparis.fr — listed at the time of writing at €15 for adults from France and the EEA, €25 outside it, with reductions for ages 13 to 25 and under-12s free. Those rates are the Opéra’s, they change, and I hedge them everywhere they appear. For seeing the building, that ticket is enough, and I say so on the ticket prices page even though I earn nothing when you buy it. What the listings I review add is a storyteller — the Phantom, the chandelier, the gossip, told by a person — and whether that is worth paying for is a fair question I answer honestly at is it worth it.

What eleven seasons in the house taught me

Which corridors visitors miss. When the auditorium doors quietly lock for a rehearsal, and how visitors look when they find out. That the marble staircase is at its best at the 10:00 opening on a weekday, before the crowds compose themselves on it. And that the ceiling divides people for good reason — Chagall’s 1964 painting sits over Lenepveu’s original, Parisians have argued about it for sixty years, and I have still not forgiven it, though I will give you the case for it at what to see inside. The practical residue of those seasons is spread across the best time to visit and the rest of the planning pages.

How I write about the listings

Ratings, review counts and prices are copied from GetYourGuide unrounded, and a live widget sits beside them so you can see the current figure rather than mine. Quotes are verbatim from real reviews, in their source language, trimmed only at sentence boundaries. I never name the operator company behind a listing, and I name a guide only where a reviewer named them first. One listing has no written reviews at all, and its page says so instead of inventing a traveller. Only one product in this catalogue has a review base of any real size, and every page that covers the others says so plainly — the whole approach is set out at the reviews hub.

How this is paid for

When you book through a link here, GetYourGuide pays me a small commission and you pay exactly what you would have paid going to them directly. That is the whole arrangement, set out at the affiliate disclosure. The reason it does not bend the advice is checkable: the most repeated recommendation on this site is the official ticket, which pays me nothing.

Corrections

Rates change, hours shift, and the Opéra’s calendar does what it likes. Confirm anything time-sensitive on the official site before you travel, and if something here has gone stale, tell me at contact and I will fix it.

Frequently asked questions