International Tour Groups at the British Museum

Sponsor:	The British Museum
Sponsor Liaison:	Stuart Frost
Student Team:	Adam Blanchard, Patrick Durgin, Cullen Jacene, and Nate Randa
Abstract:	The British Museum, located in Bloomsbury, London, attracts millions of international visitors, many of which experience the Museum through private tours. Despite the prevalence of these international tour groups (ITGs), their behaviours, impacts, and needs were not fully understood. This study developed methods for recording and visualizing group behaviours and impacts across the Museum. Sixteen ITGs were observed to construct a typical visit, and five ITG guides were interviewed to understand their experiences. Observations revealed that ITGs visit similar items, take similar paths, and impact other visitors. From these findings, the author recommended specific changes to the Museum’s group visitation guidelines and the design of galleries to improve the experience of all visitors.
Link:	International Tour Groups at the British Museum: Full Report International Tour Groups at the British Museum: Presentation

Executive Summary

The British Museum attracts millions of visitors each year, over half of which are first-time, international visitors (Frost, 2019). Many of these international visitors turn to externally run guided tours to enjoy the Museum in their native language. However, due to the size and prevalence of these tours, they can negatively impact other visitors in the museum. Our goal was to identify strategies to help the British Museum manage international tour groups (ITGs) and improve the visitor experience by:

1. Characterizing the behaviours of international tour groups
2. Determining the impact of international tour groups on other visitors
3. Understanding the needs and experiences of international tour groups

Methodology

When an ITG entered the Museum through the Montague Place entrance, we recorded characteristic information like group size, age range, time and date, and voice amplification use.

Once the group started their tour, we followed them throughout the Museum, recording the path the guide took, the places they guide stopped, and when they stopped. We also recorded participant behaviours, like engaging with the tour, as well as the group’s impacts on other visitors, like blocking access to artefacts. We observed 16 ITGs. Finaly, we developed methods to visualize this data, creating heatmaps that show where ITGs spend the most time and mapping ITG behaviours and impacts to specific artefacts and locations.

We also interviewed five ITG guides to understand the challenges their groups face, such as how they interacted with the Museum led tours or if they had difficulty accessing artefacts.

Findings

The observed characteristics of international tour groups were similar regardless of spoken language, time of day, and day of week:

• Group sizes were modest, ranging between 11 and 26, averaging 18 members.
• The tour duration varied between 48 and 155 minutes, averaging 106 minutes.
• The dwell (stop) time at individual artefacts ranged from 15 seconds to over 13 minutes, with an average of 165 seconds. This increased with tour length.
• ITGs on average stopped at 17 rooms and 20 artefacts; however, this behaviour did vary significantly from group to group.
• Voice amplification systems were used by 69% of guides.

Tours largely stopped at the same artefacts. Every group stopped at the Parthenon Sculptures, stopped at either the real or replica Rosetta Stone, and entered the restricted Ancient Egypt exhibit in Rooms 61-63.

Some rooms were favoured more by groups that spoke a certain language. all three groups that visited the Chinese ceramics exhibit in Room 95 and all four groups that visited the Asia exhibit in Room 33 spoke Chinese. The one group that visited the Korea Foundation Gallery in Room 67 spoke Korean.

Groups spend the most time between Rooms 18 and 4 in the Western Range. Groups also tend to stop in similar spots without artefacts, like the south end of the Great Court at the start of the tour, or in the corner of Rooms 53, 59, or 66 to give instructions or regroup before or after dispersing into the restricted Ancient Egypt exhibit. Refer to the heatmap in Figure 1 for a more detailed summary of popular locations. It is important to note that the heatmap does not consider group movement when split, meaning restricted rooms like 61-63 appear untraveled even though they were very popular.

The 16 tours we observed followed a very similar route. Also shown in Figure 1 is the ‘typical’ ITG route shown as a blue line. After entering through the Montague Place entrance, most ITGs travel south into the Great Court and the Reading Room, west to the Parthenon Sculptures, north up Room 4 to the West stairs, east through the Ancient Egypt exhibit in Rooms 61-63, then down the North stairs and back out the Montague Place entrance.

Every tour group we observed backtracked at some point in their tour. This usually happened along the hallway in the Western Range formed by Rooms 4, 6, 23, 17, and 18, which is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Heatmap of the Museum, where bright red represents areas ITGs spend the most time in. An approximated common ITG path is drawn with a blue line, created by connecting the most popular items among tour groups with the common paths from the heatmap. Arrows indicate direction of travel.

We found international tour group participants were more often engaged than disengaged throughout our observations. We observed 72 instances of engagement (taking photos, asking questions, etc.) and only 16 instances of disengagement (using a phone, ignoring the objects, etc.). Rooms 1, 8, and 23 were especially engaging, while Rooms 56 and 64 were the only disengaging rooms. However, we found it difficult to draw further conclusions from this data because it was often unclear whether the guide or the artefact itself engaged or disengaged members.

ITGs impacted other visitors most in the Ancient Assyria exhibit in Rooms 7 and 10. Visitor impact was defined as when ITGs blocked the sightlines of visitors, slowed the traffic of visitors, and/or diverted the paths of visitors. Figure 2 shows the number of instances of visitor impact per visit at artefacts within each room on a green to red scale, where we observed few or no instances of visitor impact in green rooms, and we observed ITGs having the most impact on other visitors in red rooms. ITGs have high impact in these rooms because they have nowhere to stop and discuss the artefacts on display out of the way of traffic, causing “Slowing Traffic”.

We observed that ITGs in Rooms 56 and 64 had high visitor impact because of the central location of a few isolated displays. As a result, ITGs tended to surround the artefact, resulting in occurrences of “Blocking”.

Figure 2: ITG impact on visitors in rooms across Levels -1-3 with green rooms indicating little to no visitor impact, and ITGs having the most impact in red rooms.

While we did not observe any negative interactions with the official museum tours, some ITG guides reported negative interactions with other private tours. The five tour guides interviewed attributed this to three reasons:

1. The number of viable routes between popular artefacts is low. Four out of five tour guides discussed how they are given a list of items they must visit by their tour company. Even when groups coordinate to vary their routes, they often encounter each other at or in between these popular artefacts.
2. International tour guides have problems sharing space with other tours. Two guides reported being inconvenienced by tour groups taking up too much space in an exhibit.
3. Some guides had problems with the noise level of other groups. This could lead to them raising their own volume and increasing the amount of noise experienced by other visitors. Of the guides we interviewed, four out of five commented on the noise levels of other groups present.

Conclusions and Recommendations

To address some of the challenges faced by ITGs, we recommend revising the established guidelines for tour groups:

1. Incorporate Blue Badge’s five-minute maximum stop time for each item. This will allow more groups to share popular items and exhibits.
2. Encourage or mandate the use of audio guide systems. This will lower the volume in the Museum and make it easier for ITGs to communicate.
3. Restrict guiding in Rooms 7 and 10. This will vastly increase the flow of traffic in these rooms.
4. Define the minimum number of people that are considered a tour group. This will clear up confusion among tour guides and could allow small groups to guide in restricted rooms.

The Museum could increase the flow of traffic and improve the visitor experience by changing the design of high-visitation rooms:

1. Add doorways to enable more circular routes and reduce backtracking. For example, we suggest that the Museum add a doorway between Rooms 18 and 19 to encourage more circulation through the Western Range.
2. Redistribute popular items to increase the number of viable routes between them. Distributing the popular galleries in the Western Range more evenly throughout the Museum could reduce congestion in the Western Range, provide various routes for tour groups to reduce encounters with other groups, and encourage groups to see a wider variety of artefacts.
3. Move larger items to the centre of the room. Designing rooms such that large artefacts are displayed centrally and small, popular artefacts are placed along the walls with space next to them for large groups could prevent groups from surrounding a display, blocking other visitors.

While this research can provide a starting point to understanding the behaviours and impacts of international tour groups, more research is necessary for the Museum to gather a complete picture of tour group behaviour:

1. Conduct more research in the summer when the Museum is busier, groups are larger, and more exhibits are open.
2. Conduct future research that centres around high-impact areas to better illuminate groups’ impacts.
3. Gather visitor impact data from a visitor perspective instead of a group perspective.
4. Conduct a comprehensive study on school groups.

The methods employed in this research can form the groundwork for conducting Museum-wide timing, tracking, and observation. While the Museum continues to research the behaviours of groups and their effects on other visitors, this Museum-wide method can be applied to other groups such as school groups, Museum-led tours, and families. It is our hope that the Museum further build off our methods, findings, and recommendations to create a more enjoyable and engaging experience for all visitors.