dimarts, 29 d’abril del 2014

Revenue Management for Museums

An idea I recently proposed is the possibility of creating a revenue management policy for museums - or other cultural facilities especially geared towards tourists.

Revenue management, as we all know from the hospitality industry, means making your prices flexible according to demand. RM can vary daily or even hourly. We are all used to pay a premium price for travel or lodging in peak seasons. It's a convenient way for companies to make some cash out of increased demand and also to make demand more even throughout the year.

So how about having people paying a premium price for visiting museums in the middle of the season? If consumers are willing to paying different prices for different times it's fair suspecting that with the museums this will be the same. Hourly variations in entrance figures throughout the day could be better controlled this way. And people would have an incentive to visit attractions off-peak hours, days or months.

I am sure the hotel industry of a given city would be willing to share their knowledge with the museums in order to set up coherent RM policies. At the end of the day, hotels welcome overnight the people that visit the cultural attractions during the day. So cooperation could be fostered among different tourism actors, knowledge could be transferred or shared and joint strategies set up -- always welcomed things.