The New York Day Pass

I bought a 1 day New York day pass on the Wednesday for 90 USD

You can choose when to activate the pass but once you activate it you have until the last attraction closes that same day to use the pass. You may wish to do some research online about the individual ticket expiry times if you wish to really maximize your usage. For example, once you have collected your tickets for the empire state building using the Pass they are actually valid for 2 years from the date of purchase. So you could spend an hour or two just collecting tickets from the attractions on the day that you activate your New York Day Pass and then return to the individual attractions later in your holiday.

On Wednesday night over dinner we planned our activities for Thursday using the pass. This is what we did…

 

Early Thursday morning we had breakfast at 8:30am

Our hotel was in midtown so our first stop was the empire state building where we got our passes activated for the day and went on the sky ride simulator and the observation deck. The observation desk is fantastic, it is my second visit and I would go again in the future. However I would not bother to go on the simulator again and the souvenir photos are extortionate at $25 each, so make sure you take your camera and snap plenty of photos yourself.

After this we went down to Pier 12 to pick up a boat ride around the Hudson River and statue of liberty. By the Pier is a trendy little restaurant called industry kitchen where we shared a couple of pizzas for lunch.

The cruise was great and we had lots of time to take photos of the skyline and the statue of liberty. It was pretty chilly on the top deck so I would advise taking an extra layer of clothing or a scarf and gloves to keep warm. The drop off point was close to Wall Street so we wandered up there and visited ground zero before heading back to Times Square where we went to Madame Tussauds (again using the New York Pass).

We had planned to have dinner in Hard Rock Café but the wait time was over an hour, so we walked up to Planet Hollywood instead where we were seated almost immediately. With our New York Passes we were given a discount of 10USD per pass off of the final bill. We had 8 people in our group that day all with passes so it added up to a huge $80 discount.

Then after dinner, we went to the Rockefeller center which is open for entry until 11pm where we arrived just in time to witness a lady get proposed to on the ice rink before we headed up to the Top of the Rock to see the twinkling lights of New York City by night from above.