Immersive exhibitions pose challenges for museums

More than a year ago we charted the rise of immersive exhibitions around the world, noting that:

It is almost impossible these days to visit a major city without seeing at least one immersive exhibition by Dali, Van Gogh or Picasso. The Van Gogh Immersive Experience in Shoreditch, London, features two-storey projections of his greatest works with  ‘ethereal soundscapes’ to accompany your journey.

It seems that the growth in immersive exhibitions is now beginning to have an impact on conventional museum experiences. Although there was a strong rebound in museum attendance after the pandemic, it seems that the market has shifted considerably compared with the pre-2019 situation. One sign of this has been the decline in international visitors in some areas.

In the Netherlands for example, there were 32 million museum visits in 2024, 2 million fewer than before the pandemic. Notably, the number of international museum visitors declined by 15% compared with 2019, even though there was a 19% growth in international tourism as a whole in the same period. Does this suggest a declining interest in culture among international tourists?

Probably not. It might indicate that tourists have found other ways of consuming culture. One of these, as we suggested, is the growth of immersive exhibitions being staged in major cities. These are often organised using content from major museums, which means that some may be cannibalising their own core business. The Van Gogh Museum developed the "Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience", which has been touring the world since 2016. After the world premier in Beijing, the Experience has travelled to other Asian cities (Macau, Shanghai, Seoul), North America (Washington DC, Boston, Chicago) South America (Santiago, Buenos Aires) and Europe (London, Barcelona, Lisbon). The exhibition has attracted over 5 million visitors since 2017, enough to fill the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum for two years.

The missing international cultural tourists at Amsterdam museums may therefore simply be consuming their culture elsewhere. In addition to the museums who are busy multiplying their own experiences through new technologies, there are also many commercial immersive experiences that may also be diverting business from the traditional museum sector. New immersive venues such as This is Holland, Our House, Fabrique des Lumières and AMAZE in Amsterdam are bound to divert some visitors away from museums, and such operations tend to target higher spending international visitors. If museums want to compete effectively with these newcomers, they will have to create their own spin-off attractions, or find room in their already overcrowded premises.

This raises question about the future of urban cultural tourism. Will we begin to see the emergence of a new immersive sector of cultural tourism? If so, to what extent will this divert visitors from museums and other traditional cultural attractions? Or will it also provide opportunities for museums to attract new audiences, as the Van Gogh Museum has done? One thing is clear - there are going to be increasing headaches for cities trying to measure cultural tourism through the usual channels of visits to museums and monuments. They may have to expand the 'cultural tourism' sector to include the new immersive attractions as well. But if they do so, we won't know if cultural tourism is growing because of increased interest in culture, or because of an expanded definition of 'cultural tourism'.