The Cincinnati Museum Center, for example, finished a $212 million renovation in 2018 and was planning to increase its ticket prices in 2020. But the pandemic caused leaders to delay those plans, reasoning that visitors shouldn’t have to pay more for reduced programming at the complex, which includes museums for children, history and science.
“Then you had two factors: our bills were coming in and guests were not,” said Cody Hefner, a spokesman for the center, which eventually raised prices in 2022 to $22 for adult entry — almost a 50 percent increase from the fee of $14.50 nearly a decade ago. Hefner said that leaders are looking at new models to prevent further increases.
“What other revenue streams can we explore?” he asked. “Do we offer birthday packages, camps, date nights and evening hours? We can’t charge more for the same thing.”
Some institutions do say their attendance has fully come back, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Eric Gewirtz, a spokesman for the Detroit museum, said membership has increased by nearly 2,000 subscriptions. But overall, arts organizations have struggled.
Raising ticket prices is so unpopular that many institutions have increased fees during periods of leadership transition to diffuse responsibility, several museum experts said. (Directors of the Whitney and the Guggenheim have both recently retired; at the Philadelphia Museum, Sasha Suda, its newly hired director and chief executive, had less than a year on the job when the museum raised its fees.)
Suda didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the museum spokeswoman, Maggie Fairs, said the admissions revenue would provide “operating support for the care of the world-renowned collections, the development of the internationally recognized exhibitions, and the presentation of public programs and educational activities.”
