"For those of you have dropped entrance fee, have you seen a surge in
attendance? I am interested to know how many are there who believe in this
practice/phenomenon?"

At the end of 2001, all National museums in the UK were made free entry. Visitor numbers increased, as you would expect. However, according to a MORI research done a few months later, most of these extra people were their existing audience (to crudely generalise: "the white middle classes") visiting more often, rather than significant inroads into new audiences. There were some exceptions to this, but I seem to recall that was the general conclusion. (There were subtleties of course, but I don't have the report to hand so I'm going on memory.)



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