Visiting museums has become a way of life nowadays, and many people "go to a city for a museum". Summer family tours, parent-child tours, and study tours have reached their peak, and the "museum fever" continues to heat up. Some popular museums are hard to get tickets for and cannot be booked.
In response to the difficulty in making reservations for museums during the summer vacation, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage recently issued a special "Notice on Doing a Good Job in the Opening and Service of Museums during the Summer Vacation of 2025", requiring cultural and museum venues in various places to improve their open service levels, implement a reservation mechanism for visits based on actual conditions, and prohibit "one-size-fits-all" reservations. The Paper recently conducted an interview on this matter.
On July 3, under the scorching sun of the ancient city of Suzhou, Ms. Wu, a tourist from Shandong, was queuing with her children outside the Suzhou Museum, a cultural landmark designed by architect I.M. Pei. She told The Paper: "It is so difficult to make an appointment at the Suzhou Museum. I mobilized my family to use multiple mobile phones for several days before I was able to make an appointment successfully."
The reporter from The Paper opened the Suzhou Museum's mini app for booking visits and found that all tickets within a week were fully booked. "It is easier to book tickets for night shows. We recommend that visitors give priority to the shows after 5 p.m. when booking," a Suzhou Museum staff member told The Paper.
The queue outside the main entrance of Suzhou Museum. Photo by Li Mei, a reporter from The Paper
This scene reflects the continued rise in "museum fever" during the summer of 2025. Tickets are also hard to come by at popular venues such as the Shanghai Museum (People's Square), the National Museum, the Palace Museum, and the Shaanxi History Museum.
Behind the difficulty in getting a ticket to a museum
The reporter of The Paper logged into the reservation app of the Shaanxi History Museum and found that all tickets before next Monday were also fully booked. The National Museum and the Palace Museum also had no tickets available through the reservation app; the People's Square Museum of the Shanghai Museum was fully booked until July 16. These top museums insist on the reservation system for a reason. The oversaturation of passenger flow leads to frequent facility failures. In addition, when visitors are shoulder to shoulder in the exhibition hall, the safety of the cultural relics in the display cabinets will face huge challenges.
Reservations for the Shaanxi History Museum are now "full"
The National Museum's reservation process has been in the "full" status
The latest data from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage shows that there are 7,046 registered museums nationwide. In 2024, museums nationwide held 43,000 exhibitions, 511,000 educational activities, and received 1.49 billion visitors. Visiting museums has become a way of life, which is especially evident during the long summer vacation.
Taking the Suzhou Museum as an example, it not only has a rich collection of cultural relics, but is also a cultural landmark designed by the architectural master I.M. Pei. It also contains the national key cultural relic, Prince Zhong's Mansion, and has always been Suzhou's premier tourist attraction. However, due to its small area, the daily capacity is only nearly 10,000 people. Faced with the demand for tens of thousands of visitors every day, even from the perspective of cultural relic protection, the capacity must be controlled.
Take the Shaanxi History Museum as an example. As China's first large-scale modern national museum, its cultural relics are among the best in China in terms of quantity and quality. Hou Ningbin, the former director of the Shaanxi History Museum, once publicly stated that the museum's maximum capacity is 12,000 people, but the number of reservations exceeds 600,000 per day, and the tickets are almost "sold out in seconds", which is simply unable to meet the demand. Previously, a netizen posted a video saying that the Shaanxi History Museum could not be booked, and it was impossible to enter even if you queued on site, so you could only buy tickets that were originally free from "scalpers".
In Beijing, faced with the difficulty of booking popular venues such as the National Museum and the Palace Museum, some technical "scalpers" have used technical loopholes to make a lot of money. The case previously disclosed by the Beijing Haidian Procuratorate is shocking: the criminal gang previously obtained the verification code two minutes in advance through the ticket grabbing software, and locked hundreds of numbers at the moment of ticket release. "When ordinary people fill in the information manually, the tickets have been snapped up." A security expert analyzed that these free tickets were sold at 80-150 yuan on the online platform, and some gangs made more than 300,000 yuan a month. "The reservation and release system was originally designed to ensure fairness and justice, but because of the existence of malicious programs, the vast majority of people have been deprived of the right to grab numbers." Bai Lei, a prosecutor of the Science and Technology Crime Prosecution Team of the Haidian District People's Procuratorate of Beijing, said in an interview with CCTV News.
Reservation relaxation and differentiated practices
In response to the difficulty of making reservations for museums during the summer vacation, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage recently issued an urgent notice, explicitly prohibiting "one-size-fits-all" reservations. The document emphasizes the need to "scientifically assess the carrying capacity of venues" to point out the direction for subsequent reforms. The "Notice" requires that museums in various places should carry out visit reservations in a pragmatic manner. In principle, reservation restrictions can be cancelled for venues that can ensure safety and have conditions for staggered and diverted visits; for venues that do require reservations, reservation rules, visit instructions, etc. should be issued, and the reservation process should be simplified. At the same time, service channels such as manual windows and telephone reservations should be retained to protect the visiting rights and interests of different groups.
After the notice was issued, museums in many places responded quickly. Shenzhen Museum and Taiyuan Museum were the first to cancel the summer reservation system, and relieved the pressure by extending opening hours and staggering the flow of visitors. The Shenzhen Museum's online reservation entrance has a striking red font that reads: Visitors can enter the museum after passing the security check, without making an appointment in advance.
What is more indicative is the changes in leading museums in Shanghai, Suzhou and other places.
On both sides of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, the differentiated policy of museum reservations has actually been implemented for a long time. Due to its carrying capacity, the Shanghai Museum (People's Square) still maintains a limited-time reservation system during peak hours, while the Shanghai Museum East Building, which opened in September last year, has already tried to allow individual visitors to visit without reservations due to its large capacity. The reporter of The Paper previously saw at the Shanghai Museum East Building that visitors can enter the museum with their ID cards after security check on the B1 floor, and it is more convenient for elderly tourists to enter through the green channel.
Exhibition site at the People's Square Museum of the Shanghai Museum
The "two-museum strategy" of Suzhou Museum is also clear: the West Hall, Folk Museum and Ancient Book Library of Suzhou Museum implement no-reservation queuing for admission, and only the main hall with limited capacity maintains time-sharing reservations. Visitors must make reservations seven days in advance through the official website or WeChat applet. In addition, from July 1, the main hall, West Hall and newly opened Suzhou Folk Museum of Suzhou Museum will simultaneously start summer extended service, with opening hours extended to 20:00 (admission stops at 19:00), and this policy will continue until August 31.
"The Suzhou Museum's main building has an average daily reception capacity of nearly 10,000 visitors, and the cultural relics must also be well protected. The West Building of the Suzhou Museum has a larger space, and through monitoring, it was found that its instantaneous carrying capacity is much higher than that of the main building." A staff member of the Suzhou Museum told The Paper that this provided data support for policy adjustments. "In the Suzhou Museum's main building, elderly tourists do not actually need to make an appointment. They can visit without an appointment by presenting their ID card if they are over 60 years old."
In Xi'an, the Qin and Han Dynasty Museum of Shaanxi History Museum is also being expanded when the main museum is under capacity. Pang Yani, director of Shaanxi History Museum, said: "This year, we have extended the opening hours, increased supply and optimized services to fully release the cultural energy of the museum." Reporters found that although there are no tickets available for reservations at the main museum recently, there are thousands of remaining tickets available for reservation at the Shaanxi History Museum (Qin and Han Dynasty Museum) every day.
On the afternoon of July 3, reservations for the Qin and Han Museum of Shaanxi History Museum showed that there were plenty of tickets left.
Shift from “Managerial Thinking” to “Server Perspective”
The National Cultural Heritage Administration’s notice on canceling reservations “across the board” focuses on “scientific assessment” and “classified measures”: venues with strong space carrying capacity cancel reservations, and especially emphasize that “venues with peak-shifting and diversion conditions can cancel reservation restrictions in principle”, while vulnerable venues optimize processes while protecting reservations. This provides a policy basis for each museum to tailor its opening policy.
When the daytime capacity is exceeded, night tours become a new experience for museums. Many museums have recently announced measures to extend summer visits. For example, the Hunan Museum recently extended the opening hours to 20:30 in the evening throughout the summer, and increased the number of reservations by 5,000 per day. The Shenzhen Museum canceled reservations and extended the opening hours to the night to exchange time for space; the Shanghai Museum East Hall reserved special reservations for interactive areas such as the Exploration Palace and the Digital Hall to avoid a decline in experience.
Hunan Museum Night Tour
Some cultural and museum scholars said in an interview with The Paper that in addition to these measures to expand visiting hours and increase reservations, a systematic solution is needed to solve the reservation problem. For example, the National Cultural Heritage Administration proposed a "three-level linkage" strategy in its notice: the central and local co-built museums should play a leading role and deliver high-quality exhibitions to small and medium-sized museums through joint exhibitions and touring exhibitions. This move can both divert visitors and activate regional cultural resources.
In addition, technical countermeasures also need to be upgraded simultaneously. Some digital security experts believe that popular museums can actually adopt a "refunded ticket without immediate release" mechanism to convert no-show tickets into on-site places; through big data monitoring of IP aggregation, abnormal operation timing and other features, accurately intercept machine ticket swiping.
"The key is service awareness, which requires more integrated resources and innovative services. The Shanghai Museum and the Suzhou Museum have indeed made a lot of explorations in this regard." A Shanghai Museum volunteer told The Paper that the museum's attempts to appropriately delay opening hours, launch "night tour" services, cancel "closing days" and other measures will also allow the museum's resources to be more fully utilized and meet the needs of tourists to visit the museum.
The adjustment of the museum reservation policy is essentially an iteration of management tools, and the core proposition throughout is how to maintain the bottom line of cultural service quality amid fluctuations in visitor flow, that is, to find a fulcrum between cultural relic protection and visitor experience, and to find a combination of technical convenience and humanistic care. When museums truly shift from "manager thinking" to "service provider perspective", the "blocking" of the reservation system and the "unblocking" of the no-reservation system can achieve the same goal, making cultural contact more warm.
