Belgian museums receive four times more visits thanks to pass

The Museum Pass, a subscription launched in 2018 to lead more visitors to museums, is fulfilling its goal in Belgium. The organisation behind the Museum Pass reported this Tuesday that pass holders visited Belgian cultural institutions four times more often than before. The pass gives access to more than 220 Belgian museums for an entire year.

"The Museum Pass's mission is to get more people to visit museums more often. Four years after its launch, we can say with certainty that we will achieve that ambition," says Erika T'Jaeckx of museumPASSmusées.

To find out the subscription formula's impact on the number of museum visits and income for museums, the Dutch research agency SEO Economic Research conducted a large-scale survey among more than 3,000 museum visitors.

The research showed that people with a Museum Pass go to museums 4.1 times more often, thanks to the so-called "multiple visit factor". In four years, 350,000 subscriptions have been sold, which accounted for about one and a half million visits.

Financially, it represented nearly two million euros in extra income per year for Belgian museums. The participating museums receive a fee on all visits with the Museum Pass and a commission on the sale of passes. In 2021, this provided the museums with a total of 2.46 million in income from museumPASSmusées, of which 1.8 million can be attributed to the extra visits made by museum pass holders.

(VIV)

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