The museum now knows a little more about its visitors after carrying out a one-year museum marketing study and conducting 2,102 situational interviews.
The study is based on the following sections:

• Quality measurement, differentiating between expectations prior to the visit and the quality perceived after the visit.
• Visitor profile, in order to see the type of people who visit the museum (gender, age, nationality, residence, education and career).
• Visiting habits, determining the frequency of visits, the reasons, time of stay and the composition of the visiting group.

Visitors in the museum rooms

With regards to quality measurement, the visitors interviewed at the entrance of the museum have positive expectations about their visit, which represents a score of 8.5 points (score before entering). This gives an idea of the level of visitors’ prior knowledge though information gathered from different sources, similar experiences, etc. The global score after the visit to the museum is slightly lower than the expectations (average of 8.4 points) and represents a degree of satisfaction of 97%.

In order to know the assessment on matters of quality, questions were asked in the survey on aspects relative to the museum (exterior signposting, signage inside the centre, mobility inside the centre, maintenance and cleanliness, the building, etc.), the service (timetable, quality-price ratio, discounts, prices, the temporary exhibition and the collection), and finally on information (information on works / exhibition, customer service, information provided by the staff and the guided visit).

With reference to the visitor profile, the survey asks visitors for information on those people who are accompanying them, which allows us to make an evaluation of the groups visiting the Picasso Museum.

Among the visitors, we find proportionally more women than men and the most frequent age group is that of 25 to 34 years ( 26.1%), followed by groups from 35 to 44 years ( 19.4%), 16 to 24 years (17.4%), 45 to 54 years (16.9%) and 55 to 64 ( 10.8%).

Age groups

The museum attracts a largely foreign public and residents of countries in the European Union (52.8%). The country with more visitors to the Picasso Museum is the United States, followed by France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany and Canada. This study includes only individual visitors and does not include public tours, educational visits or attendees at the museum’s activities, which are mostly local audiences.

Another characteristic of the visitor profile is their degree of education. 79.1% of the total number of visitors surveyed has received a university education.

The reasons given for visiting the museum are related to the theme of the museum, and thus, 97% of those interviewed are going to visit the collection, 13.1% are going to visit the temporary exhibition and other reasons, such as: curiosity or personal interest in the artist, interest in the building and the museum in general, to accompany someone or for a specific activity (seminar, workshop, course, etc.).

Regardless of the reason for the visit to the museum, the average time dedicated to the visit is one hour and forty minutes. 76.4% of the visitors surveyed spends between one and three hours in the museum and 18.5% dedicates one hour or less to visiting the museum.

Deirdre Haughey
Visitor Services

Related links
How do you look after more than 900,000 visitors a year? Taking car...