Monzo data shows £30,500 spent on Bayeux tickets in two hours
Half of the buyers were under 35, and almost half were located outside London.
By Megan Scott ·
Monzo customers paid £30,500 within two hours of the British Museum releasing a second batch of tickets for its Bayeux tapestry exhibition. The bank released the spending data on Sunday to illustrate the scale of the recent demand spike.
The ticket release occurred on Wednesday at 10 am. An online queue filled with thousands of users. The available tickets were gone in three hours. This was faster than the initial release in September, which took 24 hours to sell out.
In the first hour after sales opened, Monzo cardholders spent £14,100. That amount was 48 times the typical Wednesday morning total for payments to the museum. The bank’s 16 million customers provided the dataset for these figures.
Fifty-five percent of the buyers in that first hour were under 35. The average checkout value was £97. For comparison, Monzo customers spent an average of £19 per checkout for Spider-Man: Brand New Day on its opening morning. The total spending for The Odyssey was £7,000, and for Spider-Man it was £6,300.
The exhibition’s higher admission prices contributed to the higher totals. Peak adult tickets cost £33, while off-peak tickets cost £27. The museum notes that ticket supply is more restricted than for movie theaters.
Interest extended beyond London. Almost half of the buyers were based outside the capital. The most distant purchases came from Glasgow. The tapestry is displayed in England for the first time since it was taken to France in the 11th century.
The British Museum described the response since the exhibition opened last month as extraordinary. It has changed its arrangements to manage queues for ticket holders. This includes a ban on visitors taking photographs. Reviews have praised the exhibition’s presentation of the Norman Conquest narrative.
Source: The Guardian
