Lift tickets are released a fixed period in advance — currently around two months — and go on sale at midnight Paris time on the day they open. Summit tickets are the ones that disappear, sometimes within minutes of release.

If the top matters to you, work backwards from your travel dates, put an alarm on the release date, and be online when the clock ticks over. Second-floor tickets last considerably longer and can sometimes be bought on the day at the tower, even when the website has shown sold out for weeks.

Book on the tower’s own website. It is always the cheapest source, and everything else is a markup on the same ticket.

If the summit has gone, the second floor is not a consolation prize — many people who did both say the views are barely distinguishable. Book the second floor and spend the difference on dinner.

Three things vary: how high you go, and whether you take the lift or the stairs.

The first floor has the glass floor, the exhibition space and a restaurant. The second floor has the best actual views — you are high enough to see the whole city and low enough to still pick out individual buildings. The summit is a small enclosed platform with an open deck above it, plus the champagne bar.

Stairs tickets go as far as the second floor and are substantially cheaper. Lift tickets come as second-floor or summit versions, and the summit ticket includes everything below it.

There is no stairs option to the summit — that section is lift only, so a stairs ticket cannot be upgraded once you are up there unless the tower is selling summit lift tickets on the day.

Prices change regularly, so check the official site rather than any figure you read elsewhere.

The stairs run to the second floor: a few hundred steps to the first, a few hundred more to the second, on an open metal staircase inside the ironwork.

The case for them is strong. They are much cheaper, the queue is far shorter than the lift queue, and you see the structure properly — the rivets, the girders, the way the whole thing is assembled — which is invisible from inside a lift. Most reasonably fit people manage it comfortably, including children, and you can stop as often as you like.

The case against: it is a genuine climb, it is fully exposed to weather, and it is not an option with a stroller or for anyone with knee, heart or breathing problems.

A good compromise many people land on: lift up, stairs down. The descent is easy, the queue for the down lift is often the longest wait of the entire visit, and you get the close-up view of the ironwork on the way.

Split verdict, and worth understanding before you pay the difference.

The case against: the view from the summit is not dramatically better than the second floor. You are higher, so everything is smaller and flatter, and the platform is enclosed with mesh so photographs are harder. The lift queue for the summit is separate and additional, often adding a substantial wait in a confined space.

The case for: it is the top of the Eiffel Tower. There is an open-air deck above the enclosed level, the sense of height is genuinely different, and for a once-in-a-lifetime visit the answer to ‘did you go to the top’ matters more than the marginal view.

If you are going once and the ticket is available, go. If you are choosing between a summit ticket and a relaxed visit at the second floor with time to spare, take the second floor.

When the official site shows sold out, the second market takes over, and the markups here are severe. Standard entry regularly appears through intermediaries at several times face value, and packages built around a ‘guaranteed summit’ can reach genuinely absurd sums.

The pattern to recognise: a site that appears above the official one in search results, a price that only reveals its service fee at checkout, and a product described as skip-the-line when every ticket sold is already timed.

Booking a guided tour from a reputable operator is a different thing entirely and can be a sensible route in when the tower’s own calendar is empty, since operators hold their own allocations. The distinction is whether you are paying for a guide or paying a premium for the same ticket.

If entry is all you want, type the tower’s own domain directly rather than clicking a search result, and check for released second-floor availability before assuming the day is lost.

The whole area beneath the tower is fenced, and getting to the lifts means passing through security twice: once to enter the perimeter gardens, and again to reach the lift or stair queues.

This surprises people who budgeted for one check, and it is the main reason arrivals run late for their slot. Allow a decent margin beyond the walk itself.

Carry as little as you can. Large bags are not permitted, there is no cloakroom, and anything that looks like it could be a problem will be. Glass bottles, and anything sharp, will be taken.

The area inside the perimeter is free to walk around once you are through the check, so if you have time before your slot you can wait under the tower rather than outside it — which is a considerably better place to spend twenty minutes.

The tower has four legs and they do different jobs. Lift entry is normally at the east and west pillars, and stairs entry at the south. Which is open can change, so read the signs rather than trusting a diagram you saw earlier.

The frequent confusion is arriving with a lift ticket and joining a stairs queue, or vice versa, and only discovering the mistake at the front. The two queues can sit close together and are not always well distinguished.

Once inside the perimeter, there is a second layer of confusion about which line matches which ticket. Staff at the barrier will point you to the right one and are generally helpful about it — asking takes ten seconds and can save half an hour.

Check your ticket for a specified entrance. Some tickets and most guided tours name one.

Tickets carry a timed entry, and the guidance is to arrive shortly before it — enough to clear the first security check and find the right queue.

Enforcement is looser here than at some Paris sites. Plenty of visitors report being let through with an earlier or later ticket without comment, particularly when the tower is quiet. That is discretion rather than policy, so do not plan around it.

What is not flexible is the queue. A timed ticket shortens the wait rather than removing it, and at peak times you can still spend a substantial period between the barrier and the lift.

If you are combining the tower with a dinner reservation or a river cruise, build in far more buffer than seems necessary. The single most common scheduling failure here is people who allowed an hour and needed two and a half.

Three windows work, for different reasons.

First thing at opening is the quietest, with the shortest queues at both security and the lifts, and the clearest air for long views on a good day.

Late afternoon into sunset is the most rewarding if you can get it. You see the city in daylight, watch it turn gold, and then watch the lights come on — three visits for one ticket. Slots around sunset are the first to sell out for exactly this reason, and sunset falls at wildly different hours across the year, so check for your date and book the slot roughly an hour before.

After dark is the third option: shorter queues, a completely different atmosphere, and the city as a field of lights.

The window to avoid is the middle of the day, which combines the longest queues, the harshest light for photographs and, in summer, real heat in the exposed queuing areas.

May is the busiest month, with August, July and June close behind — this is a summer attraction in the way the indoor Paris museums are not.

February is the quietest by a clear margin, followed by January and November. Cold, sometimes wet, but with queues that bear no resemblance to the summer versions.

March, April and October are the best compromises: manageable crowds, tolerable weather, and enough daylight to build a sunset visit around.

One winter advantage worth weighing: cold clear days give the best long-distance visibility of the year, and the tower’s lights matter more when darkness falls early. One winter disadvantage: wind at the summit in January is a different proposition from wind in June.

This is an exposed steel structure, and the weather closes parts of it more often than people expect.

High winds close the summit while the lower floors stay open — refunds for the summit portion are normally handled without argument, but the visit you booked is gone. Storms can close the tower entirely. In severe heat the tower has closed early or cancelled afternoon reservations outright, with little notice.

Fog is the quieter disappointment: the tower stays open, the ticket is valid, and the view is a wall of grey. On a doubtful day, look at the top of the tower from ground level before you join the queue — if you cannot see it, you will not see anything from it.

Dress for conditions well above what the street suggests. It is markedly colder and windier at the top in every season, and a jacket that seemed unnecessary at ground level will not be.

After dark, for the first few minutes of every hour, the tower’s golden lighting is overlaid with thousands of flashing white lights. It is brief, it is free, and it is the thing people describe most emotionally afterwards.

See it from outside rather than from on the tower — you cannot see the effect properly when you are standing inside it. Position yourself at Trocadéro, on the Champ de Mars, or on one of the bridges, and be in place a few minutes before the hour.

The final show of the night is often longer than the hourly ones. Timings shift with the season and with the hour of sunset, so check for your date.

If you are going up in the evening, the simple plan is: go up before dark, come down, walk out to a viewpoint, and watch the hour turn from there.

An honest and slightly awkward truth about this monument: the Eiffel Tower is the most beautiful thing in the Paris skyline, and you cannot see it while you are standing on it.

The classic viewpoint is the terrace at Place du Trocadéro, directly across the river, which gives you the full tower head-on with the fountains below. It is crowded and worked by hawkers, but the view justifies it.

The Champ de Mars behind the tower gives you the lawn foreground and space to sit. The Pont de Bir-Hakeim gives the framed-through-ironwork shot. Rue de l’Université offers the narrow-street composition that fills social media. The Seine embankments work at every hour.

All of these are free, all are open at any time, and several are better after dark than any ticketed view. Walking the tower’s surroundings without going up is a legitimate way to see it, not a compromise.

On a clear day the whole of Paris lays out below you, and the pleasure is recognition: Sacré-Cœur on its hill, the Arc de Triomphe at the centre of its star of avenues, Les Invalides, Montparnasse, the Seine curving through it all.

The second floor is the better viewing platform for this. You are high enough for the panorama and low enough to identify individual streets and buildings, and the open sides give clean sightlines.

From the summit the city flattens into a map. It is still remarkable, but detail is lost, and the enclosing mesh gets in the way of photographs.

Orientation boards on both levels name what you are looking at, and they are worth a minute — most people photograph the view without ever working out what is in it.

The most under-warned part of the visit. The queue for the descent lift regularly exceeds the queue to go up, sometimes winding right around the viewing platform and blocking access to the edge.

This is what turns a ninety-minute visit into three hours, and it lands at exactly the point when everyone is tired and has already seen what they came for.

Two ways around it. Take the stairs down from the second floor: no queue, easy on the legs compared to going up, and a much better look at the structure. Or time your descent away from the crowd — the wait peaks after sunset and just before closing, when everyone leaves at once.

If you have a dinner booking or a cruise afterwards, plan your descent an hour earlier than feels necessary.

Two to three hours for a lift visit including the summit, from joining the first security queue to walking away. Ninety minutes if you stop at the second floor and move briskly. Add time in high season, and add time after dark.

The components people forget: two security checks, the wait for the up lift, the separate wait for the summit lift, and the descent queue, which can be the longest of the lot.

If you are climbing the stairs, allow a similar total — the climb takes longer but the queue is far shorter, so it roughly evens out.

For the surroundings alone, allow an hour to walk from Trocadéro across the bridge, under the tower and out into the Champ de Mars. That costs nothing and is the part of the visit many people end up rating highest.

There is a champagne bar at the summit, which is exactly what it sounds like: a small counter selling a small glass at a memorable price. Plenty of people consider it worth doing once, purely for where you are standing.

The first and second floors have restaurants — one relaxed, one formal — and the formal one books out months ahead. Both need reserving well in advance and both come with a view you cannot get any other way. There are also snack bars and a macaron shop on the lower levels.

Everything inside is priced for a captive audience, and nothing is a bargain.

The better plan for most visitors: eat properly beforehand or afterwards in the streets to the south, and treat anything bought on the tower as a souvenir rather than a meal. A picnic on the Champ de Mars costs a fraction and comes with the better view.

Facilities exist on the ground level and on the first and second floors, and they are consistently criticised — long queues, tired conditions, and not enough of them for the numbers passing through.

The ground-level facilities near the entrances are the most heavily used. Those on the second floor are generally a better bet, though you will be queuing there too.

The practical advice is the same as at any site with a long queue at the front: go before you join the security line, not after. Between two security checks, the lift wait and the ascent, a considerable amount of time can pass before you have a realistic opportunity.

There is no facility at the summit worth planning around, so deal with it on the second floor on the way up.

Worth being honest with yourself before buying a summit ticket.

The tower is enclosed at every level, with high mesh and fencing, so nobody can fall and the platforms feel secure. But it is open to the air, you can see the ground through the structure, and the whole thing moves very slightly in wind. People who are fine with tall buildings sometimes find this different, because it does not feel like a building.

The glass floor on the first level is a deliberate test of nerve and can be walked around rather than across.

The lifts are glass-sided and ascend at an angle through the ironwork, which is part of the appeal for most people and the hard part for anyone anxious.

If heights are a real problem, the first floor gives you the experience of being on the tower without the exposure, and the view of the tower from outside costs nothing at all.

This works well for children, better than most Paris attractions, and the reasons are simple: it is enormous, it is a lift ride, and they have all seen pictures of it.

The stairs to the second floor are manageable for most school-age children and are often the highlight — climbing inside the structure beats standing in a lift queue by a wide margin.

The things to plan around: the queues, which are hard work with tired children; the exposure at the top, which is cold and windy year-round; and strollers, which are permitted in the lifts but useless on the stairs and awkward in the crowds.

The Champ de Mars is the release valve — grass, space to run, room to sit — and a stop there before or after transforms the day. A carrier is easier than a stroller if your children are small enough for one.

The first and second floors are accessible by lift, and wheelchair users can reach both. The summit is not accessible — the final ascent involves a lift with a step and a stair section that cannot be bypassed.

The ground-level perimeter, the gardens and the area beneath the tower are all step-free and are a substantial visit in themselves.

Reduced-rate tickets are available for visitors with disabilities and a companion. The number of wheelchair users permitted on the upper floors at any one time is capped for evacuation reasons, so booking ahead and arriving early matters more here than at most sites.

The practical difficulties are the crowds and the queues rather than the building: the security checks, the lift lobbies and the viewing platforms all get congested enough to be hard to navigate. An early slot is worth more than any other single adjustment.

The tower itself is secure and well policed. The ground around it is one of the most heavily worked tourist areas in Europe.

The recurring approaches: petition signers who ask for a signature and then demand a donation, the ring-on-the-ground trick, cup-and-ball games that cannot be won, and sellers pushing miniature towers and flashing trinkets with real persistence. Several of these operate as distractions for someone else working your pockets.

The Trocadéro terrace and the Champ de Mars are as worked as the tower base, particularly after dark when the crowds gather for the sparkle.

None of this requires anxiety, just decisions made in advance: nothing valuable in a back pocket, a bag worn in front, no engagement with anyone who approaches you, and no signing anything. Firm disinterest works better than politeness.

A real question, and the reviews divide on it more than you might expect.

The case against going up: it is expensive, the queues can consume half a day, the view from the second floor is comparable to cheaper viewpoints elsewhere in the city, and you cannot see the Eiffel Tower from the Eiffel Tower. Montparnasse Tower and Sacré-Cœur both give panoramas that include the tower in them.

The case for: it is one of the genuinely iconic structures on earth, the ironwork is extraordinary at close range, and standing on it is not the same as looking at it. Those who climbed the stairs are the most enthusiastic group of all.

A reasonable middle course: climb the stairs to the second floor rather than paying for the summit lift, then spend the evening seeing the tower properly from outside. That combination consistently produces the happiest visits.

Bir-Hakeim on metro line 6 is the closest station and gives you the approach across the bridge, which is the better first sighting. Trocadéro on lines 6 and 9 is the other main option and delivers you straight to the classic viewpoint. École Militaire on line 8 approaches from the Champ de Mars side. Champ de Mars-Tour Eiffel on the RER C is closest of all.

Walking along the Seine from central Paris is pleasant and takes longer than the map suggests.

If you are arriving for a timed slot, allow for the walk from the station plus the perimeter security check. Twenty minutes of margin is not excessive at busy times.

Leaving after dark, particularly after the last sparkle, means moving with a very large crowd toward a small number of stations. Walking a few streets before picking up a metro or a rideshare is faster than joining the crush.

The best photographs of the tower are taken from the ground, and the best from the tower are of the city.

For the tower itself: Trocadéro for the head-on shot with the fountains, Pont de Bir-Hakeim for the framed-through-ironwork composition, Rue de l’Université for the tower filling a narrow street, and the Champ de Mars for the full height with lawn in front. Early morning gives you all of them nearly empty.

Directly beneath the tower, shooting straight up through the ironwork is the most underrated shot available and needs no ticket.

From the platforms, the second floor gives cleaner sightlines than the summit, where the mesh interferes. Sunset and the hour after are the best light of the day.

A note on the lights: the tower’s night-time illuminations are protected, so the usual advice is that photographs of the lit tower are for personal use rather than commercial publication.