20 per cent more visits to museums thanks to the museum year card. This will earn museums a sloppy 14 million euros extra this year. The jubilant press release about the study by a renowned agency does not lie. Or does it? After all, six months ago featured in NRC Handelsblad still read that the Museum Card Foundation was in cash trouble. Money woes caused by the museum annual pass had become far too popular.
How can this jubilation be reconciled with the distress of six months ago? After all: back then, it appeared that the reopening of the stedelijk, the Rijks and the Van Gogh in particular was causing an unprecedented influx of museum annual pass holders. People who earned handsomely on the ticket to one of those rather pricey museums thanks to that one-off expense of 50 euros a year. The foundation then paid the museums 60% of the ticket and financed it from the proceeds of the sold but underused annual passes. That is the so-called freefall by which at other locations less good experiences.
In a response to the post by Pieter van Os in NRC the museum association said at the time that the larger influx of card holders had been taken into account. For instance, the price of the card was supposedly already in the pipeline to go up by 5 euros from 1 July 2013, and the expensive glossy magazine was discarded, thus saving a lot.
So the question now is whether that has been enough. There is a good chance, we estimate, that the price of the Museum Year Card, thanks to its own success, will soon go up again by a few euros. Or that member museums will have to pay a larger share of their extra income to the Museum Association.
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