Museums, can free bid admission be an alternative to nominal ticket?

It is a summer, this one, in which, in the cultural field, there is a lot of talk about ticketing. Tourists have returned, and with them have returned both scalpers and the desire to finance cultural heritage through ticketing.

It has been talked about mainly because the Colosseum has introduced, after years of being talked about, nominal tickets, that is, associated with name, surname and ID, to combat the phenomenon of scalping that punctually occurs outside its gates. An investigation by RomaToday in the days immediately before had shown how the abusive activity takes place, for the Colosseum but also for other museums in the Capital, starting with the Vatican Museums. It has also been talked about because a FanPage investigation showed how a structural scalping is in action to enter the Vesuvius Park: there is no longer a ticket office, but there is still a ticket, purchasable only online and in an area where the only Wi-Fi available is in the hands of the stalls present. This is hardly new; scalpers have been active for decades at the Uffizi (which won a lawsuit against online scalping, but continues to deal with in-person scalping), Pompeii, and many major Italian cultural attractions. Ticketing has also been talked about for other cases and other reasons, for example, the case of theCristallini Hypogeum, opened in Naples after years of restoration and with the support of the Campania Region, which proposes a 25-euro ticket for a few dozen visitors a day: too many, according to a good part of the citizenry. The ticket, also in Naples, has been talked about because the city council wants to introduce it-where there is none-or raise it in all the civic museums, which should be managed by a foundation by the end of the year. And then it was talked about because in Venice the City Council wants to introduce an access fee for the historic city, first in Italy and in the world. And many other examples could be.

This is certainly not a new issue in a country where the average value of the entrance fee has risen 100 percent in ten years while wages were falling (and free admission for the over-65s was removed), but the post-pandemic has led to a new condition in some places, the one described for Vesuvius: the physical ticket office is gone, but tickets are required, and the only way to buy them is online, sometimes even paying pre-sale fees. You can imagine what this means for people who are not digital natives, but in general a situation capable of discouraging anyone who was not particularly motivated to visit that place. Certainly one of the many factors that has led to a collapse in cultural participation over the past two years.

Faced with this picture, one wonders whether the ticketing system that has characterized Italian museums (and others) for dozens of years is still as functional as it can be. A system that, in essence, saw the ticket as the central element of the institution’s self-financing, and everything else, from educational services, to audioguides, to cafeterias and merchandising, as “additional,” in addition. One also wonders about this in light of the fact that, after the introduction of the nominal ticket at the Colosseum - a measure while not without other privacy-related criticisms - while the scalpers, undoubtedly affected by the measure, were trying to readjust to the new conditions, it was the licensed tour guides who were protesting bitterly, denouncing the difficulty of doing their work under the new conditions imposed.

Of course, there are ways to combat scalping other than the nominal ticket, first and foremost law enforcement controls, but these, if done thoroughly and effectively, cost money. And so it would seem to beg the question: what if we change our approach and start thinking that good museum management does not require ticketing? This is not a provocation, nor is it a call for “free” access to heritage, which is also partially, but only partially, superimposed on the elimination of the admission ticket. The reasoning, made urgent by the advent of the Internet and the elimination of some physical ticket offices, actually stems from the 1990s and the creation of the “additional” services of museums and libraries: cafeterias, bookshops, catering, checkrooms, audioguides... a chaotic innovation that has led to considering “additional” services that for a museum are not at all, such as educational services. Today museums are financed mainly through ticket sales, because everyone has to pay for a ticket and not everyone buys a postcard, but also because the income from all those “additional” services has been outsourced, from the 1990s to the present, with surreal quotas for the concessionaire, ranging from 60 to 100 percent, while ticket revenues are outsourced with apportionments far more favorable to state coffers. In short, the ticket has remained the essential linchpin of museum self-financing; everything else has not.

Now, let’s assume that we have to implement a nominal ticket, that we have to provide for a (outsourced) pre-sale, law enforcement controls to prevent abuse, at every state site that knows more than a thousand admissions per day in any other season... would it be convenient, both for state coffers and for the usability and accessibility of the heritage? Now instead, let’s say that it is decided not to charge a ticket, but to ask for the most substantial offer possible, according to everyone’s availability, at the exit of the museum. Of inviting everyone to come in and spend a few hours there, to drop by the bookshop, to take advantage of the educational services-now outsourced, but which a reform along these lines would require reinternalizing-which in the case of no ticket would certainly remain chargeable. Isn’t this a less arduous system than the nominal ticket, to combat scalping and, at the same time, break down a barrier between citizens and cultural venues that for libraries, for example, does not exist? And speaking instead of small museums, and with few visitors, how much does a 3 or 4 euro ticket yield, compared to an open door with quality services, for which the highest possible offer is required?

Let’s be clear that this analysis is not meant to propose a solution, but an element of debate that could be part of a solution. Not least because revolutionizing the museum system by putting today’s additional services at the center and making donations structural would involve being able to “bill” on donations that are not billable today. In short, a long and complex reform. The problems of avoiding mass bookings and queues would remain both for the busiest sites and for those that may be visited, for conservation reasons, by sparse groups of people. However, it seems clear that for the busiest sites, things and assemblages are not solved by pre-booked tickets: there are days when the queue of queue-jumpers, at the Uffizi, is as long as the queue of those who have not paid to skip the line. Perhaps a deep reflection should be started, differentiating from place to place but starting from the premise that the priority must be to defend the usability of a place, the work of guides and operators and legality, not the ticket itself. The “big museum” model without admission fees already exists, in London, and while not without criticism - starting with the unethical sponsorships that museums have decided to accept to sustain themselves - it has ensured sustainability, despite the influx of tourists, while subscription and partnership systems for regular visitors are already being experimented with in several museums in Italy. Is a librarianization of museums possible, and perhaps desirable, to face the 21st century? The alternative of turning major museums into spaces where access is by nominal reservation only would provide for solid political thought and discussion, because the model of soccer matches and concerts from which it takes its inspiration, more or less critically, applied on events of private interest, not on essential public services.

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