Why online booking is not available for individual visitors ?

Our permanent exhibition in the Globe does not require any booking and can be accessed freely.

For guided tours, CERN visits service faces demands about 3 times higher than what the offer is.

For about 10 years, CERN has offered online booking for Individual guided tours but the experience showed that:

  • All capacity was gone in 2 seconds (literally) which created a lot of frustration (watch this video between 00:23 and 00:40 for an example)
  • Many visitors who had booked online did not show up on the day of the tour
  • This led to the handling of waiting lists which were not even a guarantee to get a tour

For those reasons, guided tours for individuals can now only be booked on site and on the day.
In order to guarantee visitors coming later at CERN a chance to get a guided tour, the on site booking is limited to 1 hour in advance (i.e. you can book a 16.00 tour as from 15.00, leaving you enough time to visit our exhibition in the mean time).