The Aircraft Carrier That Doubled Its Ticket Revenue — What Museums Can Learn from the USS Midway

One coordinator, twenty hours a week, stacks of paper vouchers. That is how the USS Midway Museum — the aircraft-carrier museum in San Diego — was still reconciling ticket sales through travel resellers just a few years ago. Today the same museum sells timed-entry tickets in 13 languages through the Tiqets platform, without a single sheet of paper. Ticket revenue through the platform has doubled since 2019, more than 25,000 tickets have been sold — and a full 70% of European ticket sales arrive through this one channel.

That last figure is the one that should make every museum sit up: these are not visitors the museum could have reached on its own. They are European travellers who bought their ticket in their own language, on a platform they already trust — before they even knew what the museum was called.

What changed for the visitor

Before: a visitor from Germany finds the museum through a reseller, receives a paper voucher, swaps it for a ticket at the entrance, and staff collect the vouchers by hand and reconcile them against invoices at the end of the month. Every reseller with its own system, its own counting, its own mistakes.

After: the visitor buys a QR-code ticket with a chosen time slot on a page in their own language. The code is scanned at the entrance, capacity manages itself, and every sale is automatically attributed to the right channel in the background. Time slots gave the museum crowd control during the pandemic — and today, a more even flow of visitors across the day.

Teardown: how it works

The technical core is a link between the museum's ticketing system (Gateway Ticketing / Galaxy) and the Tiqets platform via an API integration. The key components:

• Live time-slot inventory. The platform sees availability in real time — no more "we sold more than we have room for".
• QR ticket instead of a voucher. Scanning at the entrance doubles as admission control and the record for settlement. Twenty hours of weekly reconciliation collapsed into a single export.
• Multilingual sales pages. Tiqets translates and displays the attraction page in 13 languages — the museum writes not one word of German, yet sells to Germans.
• Revenue-share model. The platform charges commission only when a sale happens. No sale, no cost — for a museum with a limited marketing budget, that is the decisive difference compared with buying ads.

An honest caveat: the figures come from a case study published by Tiqets itself — they are self-reported and have not been audited by any third party. But the order of magnitude (25,000+ tickets, doubled revenue, 70% European sales) is consistent with what more independently designed measurements show for the industry as a whole: a study of 238 experience providers measured 36–41% growth in total revenue within 12 months of joining OTAs, with direct bookings also up 14%.

Why it works

A museum website reaches the people who are already looking for the museum. An OTA reaches the people looking for things to do in a city — and with foreign visitors, that is the difference that decides everything. The USS Midway did not double its revenue because Americans suddenly started visiting more museums; it doubled it because it became visible to European travellers at the moment they were planning their trip.

The second reason is friction. Paper voucher, exchange at the desk, a queue — every step turns some visitors away. A QR code with a time slot removed all three at once.

What this means for your museum or castle

Museums face the same structural problem and the same opportunity: a foreign guest in Ljubljana, Bled or Postojna plans the day on Viator, GetYourGuide or Tiqets — not on a public institution's website. If your ticket is not there, the day goes elsewhere.

Three steps this case points to:

1. Start with a basic ticket on 1–2 platforms and measure the share of foreign visitors after 3–6 months.
2. Sort out entrance records (QR-code scanning) so the monthly settlement with the platform is not manual work — that is what saved the USS Midway 20 hours a week.
3. Budget for commission upfront. Market benchmarks: Viator 20–30%, GetYourGuide 25–30%, Klook 15–25%. Note that commission charged by a foreign platform may fall under reverse-charge VAT rules — have your accountants check the local tax treatment of commissions before the first settlement. And when overhauling your online sales, keep the European Accessibility Act (EAA 2025) in mind: buying a ticket online must also work for users of assistive technologies.

HopGuides sets museums up end to end: listing on Viator and GetYourGuide, scan-based entrance records, and a monthly reconciliation ready for your accounting team. Write to klemen.furlan@hopguides.art.

FAQ

Does OTA selling cannibalise our direct sales? Measurements suggest the opposite: in the study of 238 providers, direct bookings grew by 14% (revenue) and 18% (tickets) after joining OTAs — the platform also works as a billboard, and some guests who see it there end up buying direct.

How much does it cost to join? Platforms generally charge no upfront fees — you pay commission on actual sales. The cost only arises together with the revenue.

Do we need an expensive ticketing system like the USS Midway's? No. The same result — QR ticket, entrance records, monthly settlement — is achievable with a far lighter setup; what matters is only that scanning and settlement are not manual processes.

Where do the numbers in this article come from? From a case study by the Tiqets platform (2021, self-reported) and an aggregate measurement by GetYourGuide with partners FareHarbor, Bókun and Ventrata (238 providers, 24 months). Both have a commercial interest — treat the numbers as directional, not audited.