Something for the weekend, sir? A little dalliance with Duchamp, perhaps? A flirtation with some cabinets of 19th-century French silverware? Time alone with an Old Master?
A visitor can indulge in all of these, as more museums and galleries get into bed with hotels and tour companies to offer special weekend breaks that include culture and accommodation.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), along with many other national museums, strikes deals with hotels around its major temporary exhibitions. For China Design Now, it has created a partnership with the Egerton House Hotel in Knightsbridge, offering not only tickets, but access to the members' lounge.
"Hotels provide the V&A with a captive audience, of both domestic and overseas visitors, who are actively looking for something to do
during their stay in London," says Jane Rosier, the V&A's head of
marketing. "Partnering with hotels enables the V&A to extend its
promotional reach."
Museums outside of London's tourist hub can also be packaged. Paul Gossage, the head of marketing and communication for Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in Shropshire, says these partnerships are particularly valuable to smaller museums without a big publicity budget.
"As with all museums, we have limited resources to spend in marketing so we get the name of our museum in a hotel chain's publicity material, which gives us a huge amount of benefit," Gossage says. "The chain hotels will quite often market the package here as part of a bigger national campaign of weekends away. It gives us a national platform we would never be able to get otherwise."
Robin Broke, director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, which includes some large national museums, believes such links are of even more value to museums such as Ironbridge that are outside large cities.
"People visiting large cities do other things as well while they're there, and they can arrange their own accommodation easily by just clicking on the internet. But if you're a rural museum, away from a large city, it's more difficult to attract people. If you were half awake, you would have links from your website to places to stay."
Ironbridge has worked on these types of partnerships for over 10 years, in particular with large-scale hotels such as the Holiday Inn Telford. But similar links are in their infancy in Britain.
"I feel sometimes that although we do have contact with the cultural sector, and museums and galleries are very much part of what we offer, that relationship is still embryonic," says Adrian Bevan, international product development manager at tourism agency VisitBritain.
Museums in the US and the rest of Europe are often more comfortable with such commercial partnerships. The Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris has been pairing up with the Musée du Luxembourg for a number of years, offering priority tickets to its exhibitions and audio guides in an art lovers' weekend package.
Hotels also reap advantages from bedding down with museums. "It's a way of highlighting our packages," says Jules Kerby, London communications manager for the Hilton group. "It's all about partnership. We promote each other on each other's website."
The Hilton group worked with Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at O2, London, offering exclusive VIP fast-track tickets that, unlike regular tickets, can be used at any time on any day. "They're queue-busters," says Kerby. "With your hotel ticket you walk straight in."
Hilton also exploited the link with the exhibition by opening an Egyptian-themed room in Hilton London Docklands, with North African decor and an Egyptian menu for in-room dining, including lamb tagine with apricots, almonds and coriander, followed by baklava. "It's a marketing opportunity," says Kerby, who used the Egyptian room as the source of many press releases. "It's also a bit of fun."
City hotels owned by firms such as Hilton and Marriott are particularly open to offering weekend packages that include cheap exhibition entrance. Many of these hotels are aimed primarily at weekday business travellers, so they want promotions to fill their rooms with tourists at weekends.
A near neighbour to O2, the Museum in Docklands (part of the Museum of London), has just finalised packages for its Jack the Ripper exhibition, which opened last month, with the Marriott West India Quay.
Different museums strike different deals with their commercial partners. At Ironbridge, hotels pre-purchase an allocation of passport tickets, giving access to all 10 Ironbridge museums over a 12-month period, at a discount on a sale-or-return basis. The hotels can then either pass on this discount to their customers or make a small profit out of it.
Barry Cheeseman, manager of Cultural Tours for Kirker Holidays, arranges many trips that include museum visits. The company often works with National Trust properties, which might open especially for them on a day when they're shut to the general public. But Cheeseman says such opportunities are shrinking, as many properties can now cater for corporate events or weddings for a high rate.
"Privately run estates are the most accommodating," he says. "They meet your demands, and for a modest fee. Sometimes you can get a private visit for a whole group for £100."
For Jack the Ripper, the Museum of London has arranged discounted tickets for Marriott guests. There are no further financial arrangements.
However, the Tutankhamun exhibition has a much broader deal. In return for the fast-track tickets, Hilton offers those connected to the exhibition discounted room rates. "We'll give them hotel rooms in return for special tickets," says Kerby.
"There's such a lot of organisation involved in setting up an exhibition. For Tutankhamun, they were coming across from America. We could put them up. We've got a commodity which we can offer potential partners." This partnership wasn't thrown together in a few weeks. "We were planning 9-12 months ahead of the exhibition starting," says Kerby.
According to Bevan at VisitBritain, the biggest challenge is the lead-in time. "In many cases, there are embargoes on exhibitions. If there's an opportunity to package an experience the tour operators need to learn about it quite early on."
Cheeseman says the biggest challenge is getting museums to let them know what they can offer by the printer's deadline. "By the time the museum lets us know, or even knows themselves, it's often too late for us to put it in our brochure. We have to know a year in advance."
Once a partnership has been forged, there's still work to do. "You can't just set it up and leave it - you need to constantly be in contact with the hotel," says Gossage at Ironbridge. "Hotels experience quite a big turnover of staff and many are from abroad. It's important that the frontline staff are always up to date on what the museum's about."
So Ironbridge works at keeping its partners informed. "We do a lot of familiarisation visits, when we invite landlords and hotel staff down to the museum to see what we've got," says Gossage. "If you're here and experience it, it comes to life. Then the receptionist can look at a family and judge if it's the appropriate place for them."
But does this only work in museums and exhibitions that charge entrance fees? Bevan says: "There's a lot of interest in some of the blockbuster exhibitions. I know there's a lot of discussion about the value of these exhibitions, and we do support free entry, but blockbusters are a great way of grabbing attention overseas. We can then use them to show that there's also a free product readily available."
Linking with hotels and tour operators helps increase visitor numbers across the board. But which visitors? The Museum of London is aiming to boost overseas attendance, already quite high at 30 per cent. At Ironbridge, Gossage says "the visitors from these hotel packages tend to be from a higher economic and social background".
As a result, Ironbridge also links up with local campsites and caravan parks to extend the reach. But it is unclear how many additional visitors are enticed through such promotions.
Vicky Lee, marketing manager at the Museum of London, doesn't know how many people its partnership with the Marriott might attract. "There's no target in mind," she says. "Hundreds, rather than thousands. It's hard to say. But there's no cost apart from discounting tickets on a two-for-one deal."
Gossage argues that there are also more subtle ways beyond commerce, marketing and visitor numbers, in which partnerships with hotels can aid a museum. "It builds local relationships as well," he says. "Sometimes hotels live in the commercial world and museums in the cultural world, and the two never come together. Partnerships bring them together."
Bevan says VisitBritain is looking forward to spending more time between the sheets with museums. "It's getting to understand how each culture works. There's all sorts of good things going on already and room for improvement as well. We're expecting to do a lot, lot more."
Dea Birkett is the director of Kids in Museums. www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
A visitor can indulge in all of these, as more museums and galleries get into bed with hotels and tour companies to offer special weekend breaks that include culture and accommodation.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), along with many other national museums, strikes deals with hotels around its major temporary exhibitions. For China Design Now, it has created a partnership with the Egerton House Hotel in Knightsbridge, offering not only tickets, but access to the members' lounge.
"Hotels provide the V&A with a captive audience, of both domestic and overseas visitors, who are actively looking for something to do
during their stay in London," says Jane Rosier, the V&A's head of
marketing. "Partnering with hotels enables the V&A to extend its
promotional reach."
Museums outside of London's tourist hub can also be packaged. Paul Gossage, the head of marketing and communication for Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in Shropshire, says these partnerships are particularly valuable to smaller museums without a big publicity budget.
"As with all museums, we have limited resources to spend in marketing so we get the name of our museum in a hotel chain's publicity material, which gives us a huge amount of benefit," Gossage says. "The chain hotels will quite often market the package here as part of a bigger national campaign of weekends away. It gives us a national platform we would never be able to get otherwise."
Robin Broke, director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, which includes some large national museums, believes such links are of even more value to museums such as Ironbridge that are outside large cities.
"People visiting large cities do other things as well while they're there, and they can arrange their own accommodation easily by just clicking on the internet. But if you're a rural museum, away from a large city, it's more difficult to attract people. If you were half awake, you would have links from your website to places to stay."
Ironbridge has worked on these types of partnerships for over 10 years, in particular with large-scale hotels such as the Holiday Inn Telford. But similar links are in their infancy in Britain.
"I feel sometimes that although we do have contact with the cultural sector, and museums and galleries are very much part of what we offer, that relationship is still embryonic," says Adrian Bevan, international product development manager at tourism agency VisitBritain.
Museums in the US and the rest of Europe are often more comfortable with such commercial partnerships. The Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris has been pairing up with the Musée du Luxembourg for a number of years, offering priority tickets to its exhibitions and audio guides in an art lovers' weekend package.
Hotels also reap advantages from bedding down with museums. "It's a way of highlighting our packages," says Jules Kerby, London communications manager for the Hilton group. "It's all about partnership. We promote each other on each other's website."
The Hilton group worked with Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at O2, London, offering exclusive VIP fast-track tickets that, unlike regular tickets, can be used at any time on any day. "They're queue-busters," says Kerby. "With your hotel ticket you walk straight in."
Hilton also exploited the link with the exhibition by opening an Egyptian-themed room in Hilton London Docklands, with North African decor and an Egyptian menu for in-room dining, including lamb tagine with apricots, almonds and coriander, followed by baklava. "It's a marketing opportunity," says Kerby, who used the Egyptian room as the source of many press releases. "It's also a bit of fun."
City hotels owned by firms such as Hilton and Marriott are particularly open to offering weekend packages that include cheap exhibition entrance. Many of these hotels are aimed primarily at weekday business travellers, so they want promotions to fill their rooms with tourists at weekends.
A near neighbour to O2, the Museum in Docklands (part of the Museum of London), has just finalised packages for its Jack the Ripper exhibition, which opened last month, with the Marriott West India Quay.
Different museums strike different deals with their commercial partners. At Ironbridge, hotels pre-purchase an allocation of passport tickets, giving access to all 10 Ironbridge museums over a 12-month period, at a discount on a sale-or-return basis. The hotels can then either pass on this discount to their customers or make a small profit out of it.
Barry Cheeseman, manager of Cultural Tours for Kirker Holidays, arranges many trips that include museum visits. The company often works with National Trust properties, which might open especially for them on a day when they're shut to the general public. But Cheeseman says such opportunities are shrinking, as many properties can now cater for corporate events or weddings for a high rate.
"Privately run estates are the most accommodating," he says. "They meet your demands, and for a modest fee. Sometimes you can get a private visit for a whole group for £100."
For Jack the Ripper, the Museum of London has arranged discounted tickets for Marriott guests. There are no further financial arrangements.
However, the Tutankhamun exhibition has a much broader deal. In return for the fast-track tickets, Hilton offers those connected to the exhibition discounted room rates. "We'll give them hotel rooms in return for special tickets," says Kerby.
"There's such a lot of organisation involved in setting up an exhibition. For Tutankhamun, they were coming across from America. We could put them up. We've got a commodity which we can offer potential partners." This partnership wasn't thrown together in a few weeks. "We were planning 9-12 months ahead of the exhibition starting," says Kerby.
According to Bevan at VisitBritain, the biggest challenge is the lead-in time. "In many cases, there are embargoes on exhibitions. If there's an opportunity to package an experience the tour operators need to learn about it quite early on."
Cheeseman says the biggest challenge is getting museums to let them know what they can offer by the printer's deadline. "By the time the museum lets us know, or even knows themselves, it's often too late for us to put it in our brochure. We have to know a year in advance."
Once a partnership has been forged, there's still work to do. "You can't just set it up and leave it - you need to constantly be in contact with the hotel," says Gossage at Ironbridge. "Hotels experience quite a big turnover of staff and many are from abroad. It's important that the frontline staff are always up to date on what the museum's about."
So Ironbridge works at keeping its partners informed. "We do a lot of familiarisation visits, when we invite landlords and hotel staff down to the museum to see what we've got," says Gossage. "If you're here and experience it, it comes to life. Then the receptionist can look at a family and judge if it's the appropriate place for them."
But does this only work in museums and exhibitions that charge entrance fees? Bevan says: "There's a lot of interest in some of the blockbuster exhibitions. I know there's a lot of discussion about the value of these exhibitions, and we do support free entry, but blockbusters are a great way of grabbing attention overseas. We can then use them to show that there's also a free product readily available."
Linking with hotels and tour operators helps increase visitor numbers across the board. But which visitors? The Museum of London is aiming to boost overseas attendance, already quite high at 30 per cent. At Ironbridge, Gossage says "the visitors from these hotel packages tend to be from a higher economic and social background".
As a result, Ironbridge also links up with local campsites and caravan parks to extend the reach. But it is unclear how many additional visitors are enticed through such promotions.
Vicky Lee, marketing manager at the Museum of London, doesn't know how many people its partnership with the Marriott might attract. "There's no target in mind," she says. "Hundreds, rather than thousands. It's hard to say. But there's no cost apart from discounting tickets on a two-for-one deal."
Gossage argues that there are also more subtle ways beyond commerce, marketing and visitor numbers, in which partnerships with hotels can aid a museum. "It builds local relationships as well," he says. "Sometimes hotels live in the commercial world and museums in the cultural world, and the two never come together. Partnerships bring them together."
Bevan says VisitBritain is looking forward to spending more time between the sheets with museums. "It's getting to understand how each culture works. There's all sorts of good things going on already and room for improvement as well. We're expecting to do a lot, lot more."
Dea Birkett is the director of Kids in Museums. www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
