Before our Alaska cruise from Seattle last month we decided to spend some time exploring Seattle and frankly I hadn't been there since I was a child and wanted to focus on the "must do" touristy things rather than get a more locals view experience like I normally do when visiting a new city. The fine folks at Seattle tourism and CityPass offered to provide us with an attractions pass that would normally cost $115 and gave us an opportunity to see many of the iconic attractions the city has to offer.

For those of you who have never tried CityPASS, it's a great system. You pay once and then you get access to heavily discounted tickets (44% or more here in Seattle) to a destinations best attractions.

This setup is now available in more than a dozen cities around the country and here in Seattle includes Space Needle and Seattle Aquarium, then your choice of three more attractions - Argosy Cruises Harbor Tour, Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP), Woodland Park Zoo, or Chihuly Garden and Glass.

We chose Space Needle and Chihuly Garden and Glass museum as well as Argosy Cruises Harbor Tour (though we were too tired after our flight to attend the time we had booked and there were no refunds after making a reservation unfortunately).

Once you have the pass, booking the individual tickets and times is super easy using their website and at least in our case, found that there was no difference in the experience compared to if we had booked these attractions individually.

The other thing I found nice about Seattle CityPASS was that inevitably there are those attractions that you might normally have just ignored but since they are included - it's easy to make the decision to see them. For instance, in our situation I knew we wanted to see the Space Needle and Chihuly Garden and Glass museum but then it was a tossup between the Harbor Tour and Museum of Pop Culture (both of which I hope to visit on our next trip to Seattle).