Pompeii and Herculaneum Tour

Ask the internet about a Pompeii and Herculaneum tour and you get a list of tours. That is the wrong first question.

The two sites are fifteen minutes apart by road and twenty minutes apart by train. They are open the same hours, they cost €20 and €16 at their own gates, and every guided product on this page walks broadly the same route through each of them. What actually differs between a good day and a wasted one is where you start it. Depart from Naples and roughly ninety minutes of your day is transport. Depart from Positano and you can spend four hours in transit to see two sites that take four hours to visit.

Google knows this even if the tour listings do not. Seven of the ten things people type after pompeii and herculaneum tour are origins — from naples, from sorrento, from rome, from salerno, from amalfi, from positano, from naples port. This page answers that question first, with the timetables and fares that make it answerable, and only then gets to which tour.

The seven origins, honestly ranked

Those are door-to-gate figures including a realistic connection wait, not marketing times. The two “no” rows are the important ones, and they are not opinion: the Pompeii park’s own access page lists every public connection to the site — two Circumvesuviana lines, the Trenitalia stop, the Pompei Link shuttle, SITA services from Naples and Salerno, Busitalia lines 4 and 50 — and lists nothing at all from the Amalfi Coast. There is a direct SITA coach from Amalfi to Naples, but it runs inland via Vietri, Cava and Nocera and does not stop at Pompeii.

From Naples

This is the answer for most people, and the margin is not close. Naples is 25.9 km from Pompeii and 11 km from Herculaneum, and the Circumvesuviana connects all three.

The numbers from EAV’s own timetable, valid from 28 March 2026: Napoli Garibaldi to Pompei Scavi – Villa dei Misteri takes 29 to 36 minutes, there are 33 departures a day, the first leaves at 05:39 and the last at 22:14, and a single costs €3.30. Herculaneum is even closer — Ercolano Scavi is 14 to 15 minutes out, €2.60. The Pompeii station is essentially opposite the Porta Marina entrance; Piazza Esedra is a 438-metre walk. At Ercolano you turn right out of the station and walk about 500 metres downhill on Via IV Novembre — pleasant on the way there, less so on the way back.

One practical tip that costs nothing: board at Porta Nolana rather than Garibaldi. It is the line terminus, it adds about four minutes, and it is the difference between a seat and standing for half an hour.

Two things to know before you rely on this line. The first is that it is genuinely unreliable — not occasionally, routinely. EAV publishes its own monthly report of cancellations and delays over fifteen minutes, and the live departure board on a normal August afternoon shows Sorrento-bound trains running thirty-four to forty-five minutes late. The director of the Pompeii park himself went public in March 2026 to say that the problem is not the strikes but “le continue inefficienze che si registrano quotidianamente” — the daily inefficiencies — after visitors were stranded in Naples with no information. The second is that this specific line is a well-known target for pickpockets, with warning signage in the stations to prove it.

None of that makes it a bad choice. It makes it a choice you should build slack into — which is precisely what the organised departures do, by putting you in a minibus instead. Our featured departure collects you outside Naples Central and runs Herculaneum first, then Pompeii after a break; the alternative meets you at the Pompeii gate and includes the train hop between the sites. Both are covered properly on the from Naples page.

A middle option: the Campania Express

EAV runs a tourist service on the same tracks called the Campania Express, and it is consistently misdescribed online, so here is what it actually is. Eight runs a day — four each way — from 28 March 2026, holidays included. A flat €15 one way, €25 return, to every destination on the route. That buys a guaranteed reserved seat booked online, air conditioning, dedicated luggage space, staff on board and in the stations, and only ten tourist stops instead of the full local pattern. You may break the journey and rejoin a later run the same day, and you may return on a different date.

Two corrections worth carrying with you. It is not a €15 supplement on top of a €3.30 fare — it is a flat fare that replaces it. And campaniaexpress.it is not EAV; the operator’s own page is on eavsrl.it.

From Sorrento

Sorrento is the quiet best-kept answer, and it is almost as good as Naples. It sits at the far end of the same Circumvesuviana line, so both sites are a direct ride with no change.

Be careful with the journey time, though, because the figure repeated across travel sites is wrong. Sorrento to Pompei Scavi is 33 to 40 minutes, not the 25 to 30 minutes usually published — the Campania Express itself, which makes fewer stops than the local, takes 39 minutes southbound and 33 northbound. Herculaneum is about an hour. The fare falls on the regional AC ladder rather than the Naples bands, so expect a couple of euros rather than the €2.60 that aggregators keep quoting from the wrong table.

For a two-site day this is comfortably workable: leave Sorrento early, do Herculaneum first at the far end, work back down the line to Pompeii, and you are home for an evening on the marina. Compare the Sorrento departures

From Salerno

Salerno is the origin nobody recommends and probably should. It is on the national rail network rather than the Circumvesuviana, and the fastest regional train reaches Pompeii in 23 minutes — quicker than anything from Naples. There are somewhere between 31 and 37 direct trains a day, from around 05:04 to 22:25.

The catch is which station you land at. Salerno trains arrive at Pompei, the Trenitalia station in the modern town, not at the Circumvesuviana stop beside the ruins. From there you want the Pompei Link: a train-plus-bus combination that runs from the station forecourt to the park in about fifteen minutes for €1.50, fifteen times a day in each direction, every day. You buy it by selecting “Pompei Scavi” as your destination on any Trenitalia channel. It is operated by Eredi d’Apice/COSAT — not, as almost every guide says, by Busitalia.

The hard constraint is the last return bus at 17:50. Plan the day around that number and Salerno works beautifully; ignore it and you are paying for a taxi. Note also that RFI is rebuilding the Naples–Salerno line to create a new interchange station at Pompeii, and that work closed the Torre Annunziata–Nocera section for whole weekends in March and April 2026. Check before you travel on a weekend.

From the Amalfi Coast

This is where the honest answer stops being a timetable and starts being advice. There is no direct public transport from Positano or Amalfi to Pompeii. Not a slow one, not an infrequent one — none.

What exists is a two-leg journey on the SITA Sud coast bus and then a train:

• Positano (Sponda) to Sorrento: 45 to 60 minutes on line 5070, roughly every thirty minutes, first bus 06:20 and last 22:30. Then the train. Door to gate, allow about two hours each way and roughly €5 in fares.
• Amalfi to Sorrento: 1h25 to 1h40 on the same line; Amalfi to Salerno: about 1h15 on line 5120, around forty departures a day. Either way you are looking at two and a quarter to three hours each way.

Add the walk up to the bus stop at Positano — the Sponda and Chiesa Nuova stops are a genuine climb from the beach — and the picture gets worse. In July and August the 5070 frequently arrives full and will not stop at intermediate stands, Positano above all. People miss two or three buses. If you are set on public transport from Amalfi, the Salerno routing is more reliable than the Sorrento one despite being nominally slower.

The ferries are pleasant and do not solve the problem: Positano to Sorrento with NLG runs 1 April to 3 November at €21.50 one way, Amalfi to Sorrento with Alilauro at €17.50 over the same season, and Amalfi to Salerno with Travelmar year-round, 35 minutes, €12.00. All of them are weather-dependent and the Sorrento-side crossings shut down for the winter. They shorten a leg; they do not remove the change.

And if the plan is to drive yourself: check your number plate. The alternate-plate rule on the SS163 Amalfitana is in force in 2026 between Vietri sul Mare and Positano, 10:00 to 18:00 — odd-numbered dates ban plates ending in an odd digit and vice versa — and it applies every single day from 1 to 31 August and 1 to 30 September. It applies to tourists. Hotel guests get a waiver for arriving and leaving, not for day trips. Get the parity wrong in August and your day ends at a checkpoint.

This is the one origin where booking a tour is not a convenience but the actual solution: a single vehicle, one departure time, and no connection to miss. See the Amalfi Coast departures

From Naples port

Cruise passengers get their own version of this question, and it has a clean answer. Ships berth at Stazione Marittima on Molo Angioino, next to Piazza Municipio.

• Walking to Napoli Centrale is 2.6 km, about 33 to 40 minutes. It is entirely possible and entirely unpleasant — Via Nuova Marina and Corso Garibaldi, heavy traffic, no shade.
• A taxi has an official fixed fare of €15.50 from the port zone to Stazione Centrale, set by the Comune di Napoli. There is also a fixed fare of €70.00 per vehicle, one way, from the port to the Pompeii excavations if you would rather skip the train entirely — and note that these are per-vehicle prices, which changes the maths for a family of four.
• A taxi collettivo runs the airport–Centrale–port route at €6.00 per passenger.
• The cheapest option is to walk nine minutes to Piazza Municipio and take Metro Line 1 or Tram 1 two stops to Garibaldi for about €1.50.

One rule that catches people every time: you must ask for the fixed fare at the start of the ride. If you do not, the meter applies and the fixed tariff no longer protects you. The fixed fares already include radio call, night, holiday and luggage supplements — there are no legitimate extras beyond motorway tolls and a €5.00 minivan supplement.

Realistically, terminal to inside the site is 1h20 to 2h05 each way. Plan on an hour and a half; budget two hours in peak season. On a standard eight-hour port call that leaves enough for both sites only if everything runs, which is the strongest argument on this page for booking a shore excursion that holds your entry and your seat.

With lunch

“With lunch” is the eighth thing people search, and it is worth understanding what you are buying. On a Campanian summer day the meal is not really about the food — it is about ninety minutes of shade and air conditioning in the middle of a schedule that otherwise runs from one exposed archaeological site to another. The reviews for these tours are dominated by heat: guests describe 40°C days, and the guides who get praised are the ones who worked shade into the route.

The lunch versions cost more and remove a decision. If you are travelling with children, or in July or August, that is money well spent. If you are travelling in April, you will probably resent the fixed stop.

Which site first, and why it matters

Every combined tour makes this choice for you, and most of them get it right without explaining why.

Do Herculaneum first. It is small, dense and sunk inside its own excavation pit, so it holds shade in the morning. Pompeii is enormous and almost entirely roofless — 66 hectares inside the walls with no relief from the sun once you are past the Forum. Walking a vast open site in the afternoon of a Campanian August is the single most common regret in the reviews, and one guest who did it in the correct order wrote plainly that starting at Herculaneum and doing Pompeii second was how they avoided the crowds as well as the heat.

Two exceptions. Our featured Naples departure runs Herculaneum first and Pompeii after — correct. The cheaper meet-at-Pompeii small group runs the other way round and finishes at Herculaneum rather than returning you to your start, which is fine if you are heading back to Naples up the line and a nuisance if you are not. Read the itinerary, not the title.

What you actually pay at the gate

These are the two parks’ own published prices, and they are separate parks with separate ticketing.

There is no state-issued combined Pompeii-and-Herculaneum ticket. Anything sold online under that name is a reseller putting two separate tickets in one basket — which is also, precisely, what a combined tour does, with a guide and the transport attached.

Two things worth flagging because they are easy to miss. First, the ticket bundled into most combined tours is the €20 Express, which means Villa dei Misteri is not included — several operators say so in their own listings. If the Dionysiac frescoes are why you are coming, you want a different day. Second, Pompeii now sells tickets exclusively through Vivaticket, they are named to the visitor, and there is a hard cap of 20,000 entries a day with the summer day split into a 15,000-person morning window (09:00–13:00) and a 5,000-person afternoon one (13:00–17:30). Herculaneum has no equivalent cap.

Opening hours, both parks, since they are the other constraint on a two-site day:

The winter row is what turns this from a relaxed day into a tight one: a 15:30 cut-off at both parks means the second site has to be entered before mid-afternoon, and there is no recovering a late start.

What is new in 2026

Herculaneum has the better news, and it is genuinely worth timing a visit around. On 15 July 2026 the park reopened the Galleria Martusciello, a scenic passage of more than a hundred metres that reconnects the modern city level with the ancient shoreline and the fornici — the vaulted boat sheds where the skeletons of the fugitives lie. That shoreline itself came back in June 2024 after a long drainage and recovery project. It is the most affecting thing at either site, and for the first time in years it is properly reachable.

At Pompeii the news is domestic and cumulative. The Insula dei Casti Amanti is open on a raised walkway that runs over the whole block. The Domus di Adone Ferito reopened in March 2026 alongside an extension of the step-free Pompei per tutti route. The Casa del Marinaio and the Casa di Championnet are back after two years of restoration, and in July 2026 the recomposed frescoed ceiling of the Casa con Panificio was unveiled as part of the park’s Dionysian programme for the year.

So what should you actually book?

• Staying in Naples or Sorrento? Book a combined tour and be done — you are close enough that the transport is a detail. Start with the Naples departures; the minibus one runs Herculaneum first.
• Staying in Rome? Accept that it is a twelve-hour day, take the earliest train, and read the from-Rome page before you book — there is one direct Frecciarossa to Pompeii and it only runs on Sundays.
• On the Amalfi Coast? Book a tour. This is not upselling; there is no direct public transport and the August plate rule can stop you driving.
• On a cruise? Budget two hours each way and book something that holds your entry, because Pompeii’s daily cap is real and your ship will not wait.
• Short on time and prepared to choose? Do Herculaneum. It is smaller, better preserved, has no entry cap and takes half the day Pompeii does.
• Actually here for the volcano? That is a separate day and a separate summit walk — our sister site mountvesuviustour.com covers it.

We are not affiliated with either archaeological park. This is an independent visitor guide with no affiliation to, endorsement from, or connection with the Parco Archeologico di Pompei, the Parco Archeologico di Ercolano or the Italian Ministry of Culture, and we use no park emblem or state insignia. Tours and tickets shown on this page are sold by GetYourGuide, and we earn a commission if you book through our links at no extra cost to you. Where a listing carries an “official ticket” flag, that flag describes the ticket and the operator who issued it — not this website.

How these facts were checked

Written 4 August 2026. Figures were read at source where a source exists, and flagged where one does not:

• Gate prices, opening hours, the 20,000-a-day cap, the named-ticket rule and the morning/afternoon slot split come from pompeiisites.org’s own tariff and timetable pages, and from ercolano.cultura.gov.it for Herculaneum. Pompeii lists 25 December and 1 January as closed but adds unless otherwise communicated — and the Ministry of Culture announced the Pompeii sites open on 1 January 2026, so treat closure days as worth checking rather than fixed.
• The three Pompeii entrances — Porta Marina Superiore, Porta Marina Inferiore/Piazza Esedra and Piazza Anfiteatro — and which station serves which, are from the park’s own access page. Porta Stabia, which appears on plenty of third-party maps, is not a public entrance.
• Circumvesuviana journey times, frequencies and first/last departures are from EAV’s L1 Naples–Sorrento timetable valid 28 March 2026. Fares are from Trenitalia’s Campania regional tariff schedules — the NA-band single valid from 4 April 2026 and the integrated hourly ticket valid from 14 July 2026, which is also where Pompei is confirmed as Fascia 3 at €3.30. The exact AC band for Sorrento–Pompeii and Pompeii–Herculaneum is not published in a form we could verify, so we have given a range rather than a figure.
• The Campania Express detail — eight runs a day from 28 March 2026, flat €15/€25, reserved seats, ten stops, hop-on hop-off — is from EAV’s own page and tariff sheet. Whether it runs year-round or seasonally is genuinely unresolved: EAV states a start date and no end date, and secondary sources disagree with each other. We have not asserted either.
• Rome–Naples rail figures are from Trenitalia (“poco più di 1h”, 100+ connections a day) and Italo (55 minutes average, 31 trains a day each way, from €14.90). We could not obtain a current Trenitalia fare range — the route page is script-rendered — so we have not printed one. The direct Roma–Pompei Frecciarossa is confirmed on Trenitalia’s own page as running ogni domenica; its 2026 fare is not published anywhere we could reach, and the €29.90 figure still circulating dates from the 2023 launch.
• Pompei Link — €1.50, about 15 minutes, 15 runs a day, last return 17:50, operated by Eredi d’Apice/COSAT — is from Trenitalia’s own Pompei Link page. Almost every guide attributes it to Busitalia; that is wrong.
• SITA Sud coast timetables are from the operator’s PDF valid 13 July to 13 September 2026. Coast bus fares are the published AC-band singles applied by distance, which involves an inference about which band each route falls in — treat them as approximate. The COSTIERASITA 24-hour ticket at €10.00 is confirmed on sitasudtrasporti.it.
• Ferry seasons and fares are from NLG, Alilauro and Travelmar directly. All sailings are weather-dependent by the operators’ own terms.
• Naples taxi fixed fares — €15.50 port to Centrale, €70.00 port to the Pompeii excavations, €6.00 taxi collettivo — are from the Comune di Napoli’s published tariff schedule (Delibera G.C. 258 of 27 June 2024).
• The SS163 alternate-plate rule rests on ANAS Ordinanza 340/2019; the 2026 calendar and the exemptions are from the official Costa d’Amalfi tourist district. The Sorrentine Peninsula runs a separate scheme with inverted parity and different hours — do not apply the SS163 rules there.
• Reliability claims about the Circumvesuviana are grounded: EAV publishes its own monthly delay-and-cancellation reports, its live board showed 34–45 minute delays on the day of writing, and the Pompeii park director’s March 2026 comments were widely reported. Pickpocketing on this line is documented in press reporting and station signage rather than in an official statistic.
• Road distances are computed free-flow routings, not measured traffic times. The “realistic” durations elsewhere on this page are judgement.
• A Campania-wide fare rise of 5.8% was approved on 30 June 2026 but the per-fare figures had not been published when this was written. Every euro figure here is the one currently in force and may move.
• Tour prices, ratings, review counts, inclusions and reviewer quotes come from the booking platform’s own listings, captured in 2026, and change over time.

Prices, timetables and access rules in Campania change without much notice. Confirm on pompeiisites.org, ercolano.cultura.gov.it and eavsrl.it before you build a day around them.