Excellent organisation,arrived at 11am,small queue.Separate queue(to the right)for online bookings but we didn’t know this until we queued in another(no signage).Luckily was small queue so took minutes.Left our luggage for free in luggage store,just opposite ticket office.Place is beautiful,audio guide helpful&included a map (otherwise you buy paper one).Spent 3.5hours,saw everything.Could’ve done it quicker or longer.Pizza restaurant just outside was nice,walked further to find more places but they were all shut(was 3pm?). Annoyingly was told that this ticket didn’t include audio guide.I definitely selected this option,so not sure what happened.Had to pay €8 each for it.Collection next to ticket office. You could definitely buy on door&save.I suppose in height of season,you might not want to risk it. Place itself is worth going,but if you had to choose between this&Pompeii,the latter would always come top.It was nice to see more intact buildings,but it didn’t have the same awe.

Herculaneum is a fascinating place that I had not heard of before this trip. It is smaller and easier to navigate than Pompeii and our experience at Pompeii the day before made us familiar with the types of sites we saw at Herculaneum. And there are some adorable cats at the place. We did not get the audio guide, which might have been a useful addition, but the place is easy to navigate without it. The only thing I would add is that there was not a line to buy tickets, so I could have chosen just to buy the admission at the entrance rather than pre-booking

Even if you purchase ahead, you still need to stand in line for your paper ticket. The employees there were super rude to the older pille ahead of us. Also, the ramp to go down to start the audio was closed off. Everyone e with audio was super confused where to start. We spent a lot of time helping others figure it out. Other than that, highly recommend the site, very impressive! We spent almost 4 hours there.