The Palace Museum at Beijing’s Forbidden City has done away with admission sales at the door and will now sell tickets only online.
Forbidden City entrance tickets will only be avaliable online
It aims to make online ticket booking convenient by increasing its sales channels, such as developing a smartphone ticketing system that can be accessed by scanning a QR code.
The Forbidden City adopted a new trial policies since June to limit admission to 80,000 tickets per day and require ticket purchases by name to stamp out fraud by touts. The daily quota was almost always maxed out during peak seasons such as the National Day Golden Week and the summer holidays.
During the Golden Week, online sales constituted up to 62.5% of total sales on the busiest days, which was three to six times higher than last year.
The Palace Museum received 70,000 to 80,000 visitors daily on the six days of the Golden Week holiday. This underscores the effectiveness of the policy requiring ticket purchases by name, and helped win public support for the policy.
As museum data show that the peak time for visits is from 10:30 AM to 12pm, museum staff intend to conduct a public consultation on admitting visitors by four time segments.
For example, the first period would be from 8:30-10:30am and limited to 30,000 visitors. The second period from 10:30am-12:30pm and limited to 20,000 visitors, and the third and fourth period are from 12:30-14:30pm and 14:30-16:00pm respectively, each limited to 15,000 visitors. (Translation by David)
