The effects of the Dutch museum pass on museum visits and museum revenues

The Dutch museum pass gives unlimited access for a year to most major Dutch museums and around the half of all Dutch museums for a fixed fee. The fee revenues are distributed among participating museums in proportion to the amount of visits by pass holders and their ticket prices. In this paper, it is researched whether the museum pass increases the number of museum visits and whether it leads to higher revenues of participating museums. For this, an econometric count model of museum visits is used. The model accounts for different characteristics of museum visitors with and without a museum pass as well as for the endogenous relationship between museum visits and the ownership of a museum pass. It is found that owners of a museum pass visit a museum three times as much as they would have done when they would not own a museum pass. We estimate that in 2012, the 900,000 owners of a museum pass made 3.4 million additional visits to participating museums because of the museum pass. In addition, these additional visitors spent money in their cafés and museum shops. Consequently, museums earned an estimated € 26.6 million more by participating in the museum pass.