How Museums Can Increase Revenue Without Raising Ticket Prices

By Aimee · 9 September 2026 · 5 min read

The Power of Visitor Engagement and Secondary Spend

For museums across the UK, the financial landscape has never been more challenging. While museums continue to preserve history, celebrate culture, and educate future generations, many are doing so under increasing financial pressure. Reduced public funding, rising operational costs, and changing visitor expectations have created a difficult balancing act: how can museums continue delivering exceptional cultural experiences while remaining financially sustainable?

At the same time, visitors now expect more than static exhibitions. Today's museum-goers are accustomed to personalised digital experiences, intuitive navigation, tailored recommendations, and interactive content in almost every aspect of their daily lives. They increasingly expect the same level of convenience and engagement when visiting cultural venues.

For museum directors, visitor experience managers, and commercial teams, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is clear: budgets continue to tighten. The opportunity lies in creating richer visitor experiences that naturally encourage guests to spend more time on-site and increase revenue through secondary spend.

Rather than charging visitors more simply to walk through the doors, museums can unlock significant commercial opportunities by helping visitors discover everything their venue has to offer. This is where BAENAV is transforming the museum experience.

Overview:

1. The Growing Funding Challenge Facing UK Museums
2. Three Ways Museums Can Respond
3. What is Secondary Spend?
4. Why Many Museums Miss Out on Secondary Spend
5. The Link Between Visitor Engagement and Revenue
6. How BAENAV Can Help Through Smarter Visitor Engagement
7. How Museums Can Participate in the Research Pilot
8. FAQs

The Growing Funding Challenge Facing UK Museums

Many UK museums have experienced years of financial uncertainty. Local authority budget reductions, inflation, increasing utility costs, conservation expenses, and staffing pressures have all contributed to a difficult operating environment. For many museums, especially those offering free admission, every pound matters.

Yet museums still have a responsibility to:

• Protect priceless collections
• Deliver engaging educational experiences
• Attract new audiences
• Improve accessibility
• Invest in digital innovation
• Maintain historic buildings
• Support local communities

Meeting these expectations with shrinking budgets is becoming increasingly difficult.

Three Ways Museums Can Respond

When revenue becomes strained, museum leaders typically consider three options.

1. Introduce or Increase Admission Charges

For museums that currently offer free or low-cost admission, charging visitors more may appear to be the simplest solution. However, higher ticket prices often create new barriers.

Museums exist to make culture accessible. Charging more can discourage families, schools, young adults, tourists, and lower-income communities from visiting. In many cases, increased ticket prices can even reduce visitor numbers over time, undermining the museum's wider mission. While admission fees may provide an immediate financial boost, they are rarely the most sustainable long-term strategy.

2. Reduce Staff and Operational Costs

Another common response is cost-cutting. Reducing front-of-house staff, visitor services teams, educators, or operational budgets can help balance finances in the short term.

Unfortunately, this often comes at the expense of the livelihoods of workers and impacts the overall visitor experience. Longer queues, fewer knowledgeable staff available to answer questions, reduced educational programming, and limited visitor support can negatively affect satisfaction, reviews, and repeat visits. Ultimately, not only would staff suffer, but cutting resources can make museums less attractive to visitors precisely when engagement matters most.

3. Increase Secondary Spend: The Most Sustainable Solution

Rather than asking visitors to pay more simply to enter, museums can focus on increasing the value of each visit. This is achieved by encouraging greater secondary spend.

Unlike raising admission prices or reducing staff, increasing secondary spend enhances both the visitor experience and the museum's financial sustainability. It creates a genuine win-win. Visitors enjoy discovering more of what the museum offers, while museums generate additional income that can be reinvested into exhibitions, conservation, education, and future visitor experiences.

What Is Secondary Spend?

Secondary spend refers to any money visitors spend after entering the museum.

Examples include:

• Purchases in the gift shop
• Food and drinks in the café
• Temporary exhibitions
• Paid guided tours
• Workshops and educational events
• Children's activities
• Memberships
• Donations
• Special experiences
• Exclusive merchandise

Although these purchases may seem relatively small individually, collectively they can represent a substantial source of revenue. For many museums, secondary spend has become one of the most important opportunities for financial growth because it doesn't require increasing admission prices. Instead, it encourages visitors to engage more deeply with everything the museum already offers,

Why Many Museums Miss Out on Secondary Spend

Many museums already have excellent cafés, beautiful gift shops, exciting temporary exhibitions, and engaging events. The challenge isn't necessarily what they offer. It's whether visitors know those experiences exist. Consider a typical museum visit. A guest arrives with a general idea of what they'd like to see. They explore several galleries. Perhaps they become tired halfway through. They leave after viewing the permanent collection.

What they may not realise is that:

• A fascinating special exhibition is taking place upstairs.
• A children's workshop starts in twenty minutes.
• The café serves locally sourced food.
• The gift shop stocks exclusive products inspired by the exhibition they've just enjoyed.
• A membership would provide more access or discounts to future events.

These are missed opportunities, not because visitors weren't interested, but because they simply weren't aware of them at the right moment. Without timely information, personalised recommendations, and intuitive navigation, valuable commercial experiences often remain undiscovered.

The Link Between Visitor Engagement and Revenue

Visitor engagement is often discussed in terms of education, learning, and satisfaction. These outcomes remain incredibly important. However, visitor engagement also has measurable commercial value.

When visitors are actively engaged, they tend to:

• Stay longer.
• Explore more galleries.
• Attend additional exhibitions.
• Take breaks at the café.
• Browse the gift shop.
• Participate in events.
• Return for future visits.
• Recommend the museum to friends and family.

In other words, better visitor engagement naturally creates more opportunities for secondary spend.

The goal is never to encourage unnecessary purchases. Instead, it is to help visitors discover experiences and products that genuinely enhance their visit while increasing the museum's overall commercial performance.

How BAENAV Can Help Through Smarter Visitor Engagement

This is where BAENAV provides real value. BAENAV acts as an intelligent visitor engagement layer that connects guests with the experiences, exhibitions, amenities, and products most relevant to their interests. Every visitor arrives with different motivations. Some love contemporary art. Others are fascinated by local history. Families often prioritise interactive exhibits and children's activities. Tourists may only have two hours available.

BAENAV helps museums deliver a personalised journey for each visitor, ensuring they discover more of what matters to them and more of what the museum has to offer.

Instead of relying on chance, museums can actively guide visitors toward experiences that increase satisfaction while also supporting commercial objectives.

• Increase Awareness of Temporary Exhibitions and Events
• Personalised Recommendations Create Better Visitor Experiences
• Connecting Visitors with the Gift Shop
• Helping Visitors Discover Cafés and Rest Areas
• Ensuring Visitors Don't Miss Hidden Opportunities
• Better Data for Better Decisions
• Supporting Accessibility and Inclusive Experiences

This is an important research stage in BAENAV's development, and looking for venues to participate as we explore the relationship between visitor engagement and secondary spend.

If cultural venues can better understand and respond to individual visitor journeys, they may be able to improve visitor experience and engagement. With the potential positive commercial outcome could be increased secondary spend.

The trial phase is designed to investigate whether this happens. BAENAV is therefore looking for museums, galleries, heritage sites and other cultural spaces willing to participate in testing the concept. The aim is to measure the potential impact across two connected areas:

Visitor outcomes

• Better navigation
• Greater discovery
• Improved engagement
• Reduced friction
• Improved accessibility
• More meaningful visitor experiences

Commercial outcomes

• Increased awareness of paid experiences
• Greater café engagement
• Increased retail opportunities
• Event participation
• Membership opportunities
• Donations?
• Potentially, increased overall secondary spend

The purpose of the trial is to help venues establish a system of Experience Intelligence through testing BAENAV's technology for the improvement of visitor engagement and to bridge financial and knowledge gaps in the cultural sector.

How Museums Can Participate

For cultural organisations, participating in the trial is an opportunity to explore a question that is increasingly important: Can better visitor intelligence create better visitor experiences and potentially better commercial performance?

Participating venues can help BAENAV understand:

• How visitors currently navigate their spaces
• Where friction occurs
• What experiences visitors miss
• How recommendations influence behaviour
• What information visitors actually find useful
• Whether engagement can be measured more effectively
• Whether improved discovery translates into commercial activity

The objective is not simply to install another digital tool. It is to learn together. Museums and cultural organisations bring the real-world environments, audiences and expertise. BAENAV brings the technology and the Experience Intelligence hypothesis. The trial creates an opportunity to test both.

Ready to Transform Your Museum's Visitor Experience?

Every visitor who misses a temporary exhibition, struggles to find the café, or leaves without discovering your gift shop represents a missed opportunity, not only for revenue, but for creating a richer, more memorable experience.

BAENAV helps museums turn those missed opportunities into meaningful moments through intelligent navigation, personalised recommendations, and enhanced visitor engagement.

If you're looking for a smarter way to increase secondary spend while improving every stage of the visitor journey, BAENAV can help your museum achieve both commercial and visitor experience goals.

Discover how BAENAV can help your museum create more engaging, profitable, and memorable visitor experiences.