Intro

With nearly 60 million tourists visiting each year, New York City, or the Big Apple, is the most visited city in the United States. Spread across five different boroughs, each dotted with its own culturally diverse neighborhoods, New York is truly a city unlike any other in the world.

From a trip planning perspective, however, New York can be a little tricky, and deceiving, to navigate. This is because most of the museums and landmarks that leap into tourists' minds (such as The Met, the Empire State Building, the American Museum of Natural History, MoMA) do not require booking ahead, and these places virtually never sell out. In fact, many don't even have time-slots to pre-book. These institutions have been built, remodeled, and expanded throughout the decades to withstand the growing swarms of tourists. So for the prospective tourist in NYC, it is actually some of the lesser-known attractions that require pre-booking attention.

The last thing you ever want is to get to your hotel, pick up some brochures in the lobby, and start planning out a schedule of activities, only to find out after you start doing your research online that these places are booked up for the entire span of your vacation.

If you're planning a trip to New York City, here are the things that I would recommend you book first. For the most up-to-date list of all the attractions in New York City that you should consider booking ahead, visit What2Book's New York City Page.

Book These New York City Attractions 2+ Months Before Your Trip

Statue of Liberty Crown Visit

The Statue of Liberty is an icon of New York, and of America itself. Lady Liberty welcomes millions of tourists each year, and the vast majority of visitors only set foot on Liberty Island, or ascend the pedestal base. Both of those visits should be booked at least a week ahead, especially during the peak summer months.

But for the more adventurous, ascending all the way up the interior of the statue to the crown can be the highlight of one's New York City adventure. This is an experience very few people get to partake in; due to the extremely narrow staircases and limited space at the top, visits are limited to only about a hundred or so visitors per hour time-slot. And it isn't for the faint of heart either; getting to the top is equivalent to climbing a 20-story building when all is said and done.

You'll want to book a Crown Reserve ticket at least 3 months ahead, although I have seen a few random time-slots open up just a few weeks ahead during the off-season, so you can keep your eyes peeled if looking for a spot opening from a cancellation.

Broadway Shows (Especially New Blockbusters)

There isn't anything quite like taking in a Broadway show in midtown Manhattan. In fact, Broadway shows draw nearly 15 million attendees each year, roughly the same number of tourists that visit the city of Barcelona in a given year. Fortunately, there are 41 official theaters in Manhattan, and each one runs its resident show 8 times per week (typically Tuesday through Sunday evenings, plus a couple of matinees).

How early you will want to book is completely dependent on the show you want to see and how much of a surcharge you're willing to pay for secondary market tickets. For the popular shows that are new releases, you'll want to book 3 months out at a minimum. For popular long-running shows that have been out for years (Chicago has been playing continuously since 1996 and The Lion King since 1997), these can be booked 4-8 weeks ahead for fair prices.

If you aren't too picky about what you see, and just want to see something, you can easily wait a week ahead or even find same-day tickets at the box office most of the time, especially for weekday matinees for less in-demand shows. And keep in mind that, with the secondary market, almost any show is accessible at any time if you're willing to pay extortionate prices for it.

Book These New York City Attractions 2-4 Weeks Before Your Trip

The Tenement Museum

Housed within an unassuming building in the Lower East Side, the Tenement Museum tells the story of how immigrants from around the world shaped New York City's history during the late 19th and early 20th century. It's not simply a museum; it is a fully preserved tenement building, the only one of its kind in the United States, that shows how an estimated 15,000 people from more than 20 countries lived their lives in these cramped quarters. It's a fantastic way to learn about the history of New York through immersion, and can be especially powerful if you have ancestors who immigrated to New York through Ellis Island.

Because access only takes the form of small guided tours, it's important to book at least a few weeks ahead to secure a spot. The museum offers around 10 apartment tours, with each one focused on a particular family that lived in one of the tenements at some point in history. There is no single best tour, and none is simply an overview; the right selection is the one that aligns with what you are interested in.

SUMMIT One Vanderbilt

Of all the observation decks in New York City (and there are quite a few that have sprung up this decade), SUMMIT One Vanderbilt is the one you need to plan ahead for. I'm not sure if I would call it strictly an observation deck; it's more of a multi-level immersive art installation that spans mirrored rooms, skyboxes, and glass elevators. It's a divisive attraction; it's very expensive, is often jam-packed, and the views are good but incontestably worse than the alternatives. But it is a unique experience, and if you have your heart set on going, I won't be the one to stop you.

That being said, you will want to book ahead. For a wide selection of time-slots, including the most in-demand sunset time-slots, I'd recommend booking 4 weeks ahead during peak season and 2 weeks ahead during the off-season. If you aren't too picky about time-slot selection, you can get away with buying your ticket just a few days ahead. Same-day tickets are sold if availability allows, but I would strongly recommend against it; the queues are usually quite long.

Book These New York City Attractions 1 Week Before Your Trip

Ellis Island Hardhat Tour

Nearly everyone who takes the ferry out to Ellis Island visits the north side, where the restored Main Building now houses the immigration museum. But very few people see the other half. On the island's south side sits a complex of 29 buildings that made up the Ellis Island hospital, once the largest US Public Health Service facility in the country, where arriving immigrants who failed their medical inspection were treated before being admitted or sent home. The 750-bed complex has sat abandoned since 1954, and the only way inside is the Hardhat Tour run by Save Ellis Island, the National Park Service's preservation partner.

The 90-minute guided walk takes you through the laundry building, the contagious disease wards, the kitchen, and the mortuary and autopsy room, all of it left in a state of arrested decay with peeling paint and rusted equipment still in place. Layered on top of the ruins is Unframed, an installation by the French artist JR, who pasted archival photographs of actual hospital patients onto 16 interior walls so that the people who lived here appear in the rooms where they were treated.

There are only a handful of departures on the days the tour runs, and group sizes are small, so this sells out well before the standard ferry tickets do. Book about 1 week ahead for a reasonable choice of departure times, and closer to 2-3 weeks if you're visiting during the summer or want the early bird slot. Tours are also weather-dependent, which is worth factoring in if your trip has only one flexible day in it.

9/11 Memorial & Museum Guided Tour

The outdoor 9/11 Memorial is free, open daily from 8am to 8pm, and requires no booking whatsoever. You can walk right up to the twin reflecting pools set in the footprints of the towers, read the names inscribed along the bronze parapets, and find the Survivor Tree. The museum below it is a separate ticket, and it is one of the few places in New York where I would push you toward the guided version rather than doing it alone.

The museum is enormous and descends 70 feet to the bedrock foundations of the World Trade Center, and the historical exhibition is dense enough that first-time visitors routinely spend two hours inside and still feel they missed things. An expert guide gives the place the meaning it deserves. The standard Museum Tour runs 60 minutes and includes admission, and there's a comprehensive combined tour that covers both the outdoor memorial and the museum.

Museum tickets are released up to six months in advance, but the guided tours are the part that constrains you: they run on limited daily schedules with small group caps, so they disappear long before general admission does. Book about 1 week ahead for a standard tour and 2-3 weeks ahead for Early Access. One thing worth knowing if you're on a budget: admission is free on Monday evenings from 5:30pm to 7pm, but those tickets are released at 7am that same Monday on a first come, first served basis and they go almost immediately.

United Nations (UN) Guided Tour

Walking into UN Headquarters is one of the stranger experiences available to a tourist in New York, because the moment you clear security you are technically no longer in the United States. The 18-acre complex on the East River is international territory belonging to the 193 member states, and the one-hour guided tour is the only way for a member of the public to see inside it. The General Assembly Hall and the Security Council Chamber are closed to anyone not on a tour, which makes this one of the rare attractions where the guided option isn't an upsell, it's the entire product.

Your guide will walk you through the halls of the Conference Building and into the chambers themselves, meetings permitting, alongside the Chagall stained glass window, the knotted revolver sculpture outside, and the artifacts recovered from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tours are capped at 20 people and are offered in all six official UN languages, plus others on request. If you have a specific interest, there are themed alternatives running on a rotating schedule, including an architecture tour of what its eleven designers called the Workshop for Peace, an art tour of the gifts collection, and a garden tour of the North Lawn that runs from May through August.

Book about 1 week ahead, and further out if you want a tour in a language other than English or one of the themed tours, which run only on specific days. Keep in mind that tours run on weekdays only, and the entire complex closes to the public during the high-level General Assembly meetings and the general debate in September, with tours resuming in early October. If your trip lands in late September, check the calendar before you plan around this one.

Statue of Liberty Pedestal Visit

If the crown tickets are gone, and for most people they will be, the pedestal is the consolation prize that turns out to be a perfectly good prize on its own. General admission gets you onto Liberty Island and no further, which means viewing Lady Liberty the way everyone views her, from the outside. A pedestal ticket gets you inside the granite base and up roughly ten stories, to the open-air terrace at the statue's feet. From up there you're looking straight up at the copper underside of her robes and straight back at the Lower Manhattan skyline across the harbor, and you can see up into Gustave Eiffel's interior iron framework through the glass ceiling.

The best part is the price. The pedestal ticket costs essentially the same as the standard ferry ticket, around $26, and every ticket type includes round-trip ferry transportation, the Statue of Liberty Museum, and admission to Ellis Island. It is 215 steps to the top of the pedestal, but unlike the crown there is an elevator for anyone who would rather not climb them.

Pedestal capacity is capped, and tickets are sold online only through Statue City Cruises. This means you cannot upgrade to a pedestal ticket once you are standing on Liberty Island, and the very limited same-day pedestal reservations are available only at the mainland ticket offices before you board. Book about 1 week ahead for a good spread of ferry departure times. If you want a quieter experience, the earliest ferries get you to the island before the crowds thicken and before the afternoon haze settles over the harbor.

The Frick Collection

The Frick Collection is New York's finest small museum, and it is finally back where it belongs. The Gilded Age mansion that the Pittsburgh steel magnate Henry Clay Frick built for himself on Fifth Avenue in 1914 reopened in April 2025 after a five-year, $220 million renovation, and the second-floor rooms where the family actually lived are now open to the public for the first time in the museum's ninety-year history. Roughly 1,800 works of European art hang in domestic rooms rather than galleries, which is the whole point of the place: three Vermeers, two Holbeins staring at each other across a fireplace, and a room of Fragonards that would justify the admission price on its own.

Two policies to know about before you get there: No children under the age of 10 are admitted, full stop, which makes this a poor choice for a family day and a wonderful one for anybody traveling without kids. And photography is not permitted anywhere in the galleries. Everyone aged 10 to 18 gets in free.

Timed tickets are the sensible way in, and about 1 week ahead is enough for a good choice of entry times during most of the year. Push that out further for two specific slots that go much faster than the rest: the pay-what-you-wish admission on Wednesday afternoons from 1:30pm to 5:30pm, and the free First Friday evenings from 5:30pm to 9:00pm on the first Friday of most months. A limited number of same-day tickets are held back for walk-ups, but the standby queue on discounted days can be long, and because the mansion holds so few people at a time, visitors sometimes have to leave before the next ones are let in.

To Learn More

For an up-to-date list of all the attractions in New York City that you should consider booking ahead, visit What2Book's New York City Page.