184

News

Fewer visitors to Copenhagen museums now they’re not free

Ben Hamilton
November 8th, 2016


This article is more than 8 years old.

Nationalmuseet and Statens Museum for Kunst remain hopeful guests will return once they get used to paying

The view of Statens Museum for Kunst is worth the price alone surely (photo: Martin Lindner)

Visitor numbers to two of Copenhagen’s most prominent museums are in freefall since they re-introduced admission prices at the start of the summer, reports Metroxpress.

READ MORE: Denmark’s two largest museums no longer free

Down as much as 30 percent
The decline has been most severe at Nationalmuseet (National Museum of Denmark), where numbers have fallen by 30 percent since the change. Its tickets cost 75 kroner per adult.

Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Art), which normally receives 450,000 visitors every year, estimates that it is receiving 3,400 fewer per month – the equivalent of only a 9 percent fall. Its tickets cost 110 kroner.

Addressing the cuts
The museums introduced the admission fees in response to budget cuts imposed by the Venstre-government last year.

Statens Museum for Kunst is charged with saving about 16 million kroner over the next four years.

However, children can still visit both museums for free.

Hopeful they will return
Both museums are hopeful the visitors will return when they have acclimatised to the prices.

“We saw the same thing happen in Sweden,” Nationalmuseet vice-director Camilla Mordhorst told Metroxpress.

“After four to five years, they had regained the number of visitors, and it is the same strategy that we are working with.”


Share

Most popular

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to receive The Daily Post

















Latest Podcast

A survey carried out by Megafon for TV2 has found that 71 percent of parents have handed over children to daycare in spite of them being sick.

Moreover, 21 percent of those surveyed admitted to medicating their kids with paracetamol, such as Panodil, before sending them to school.

The FOLA parents’ organisation is shocked by the findings.

“I think it is absolutely crazy. It simply cannot be that a child goes to school sick and plays with lots of other children. Then we are faced with the fact that they will infect the whole institution,” said FOLA chair Signe Nielsen.

Pill pushers
At the Børnehuset daycare institution in Silkeborg a meeting was called where parents were implored not to bring their sick children to school.

At Børnehuset there are fears that parents prefer to pack their kids off with a pill without informing teachers.

“We occasionally have children who that they have had a pill for breakfast,” said headteacher Susanne Bødker. “You might think that it is a Panodil more than a vitamin pill, if it is a child who has just been sick, for example.”

Parents sick and tired
Parents, when confronted, often cite pressure at work as a reason for not being able to stay at home with their children.

Many declare that they simply cannot take another day off, as they are afraid of being fired.

Allan Randrup Thomsen, a professor of virology at KU, has heavily criticised the parents’ actions, describing the current situation as a “vicious circle”.

“It promotes the spread of viruses, and it adds momentum to a cycle where parents are pressured by high levels of sick-leave. If they then choose to send the children to daycare while they are still recovering, they keep the epidemic going in daycares, and this in turn puts a greater burden on the parents.”