We recently joined some friends for a day at the Historic Royal Palace of Hampton Court, a place we hadn’t visited since 2018. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision but although we didn’t plan our day we did check the website. And the website encouraged us to pre-book our tickets in advance. So we did.
The kids were buzzing with excitement, the weather was perfect, and we were looking forward to our day in the splendour of the palace and its gardens. And the day lived up to our expectations, filled with exploration, fun, and a lot of history.
So as we were preparing to leave, the option to upgrade our tickets to an annual membership was a no-brainer. Not only would this make it possible to come back to Hampton Court over the next twelve months, including for the upcoming food festival (which was the reason we had come six years ago) but it covers the Tower of London, which we’d also had a half-formed plan to visit.
We were excited to think that for just a little bit extra on top of what we’d already paid, we could unlock a year of unlimited visits. However, this excitement quickly faded when we discovered the fine print of the upgrade policy—a detail that unfairly targets families.
The ‘eligible’ ticket trap
Historic Royal Palaces allow you to upgrade your eligible admission tickets to a membership, deducting their cost from the membership price.
But there’s a catch.
When I went to the ticket office to do the upgrade I was floored to discover that they would only consider our adult tickets as being “eligible” for an upgrade. The child tickets didn’t count.
This meant that the £81.60 we ‘d spent on 2 adult and 2 child tickets couldn’t be put towards the family membership in full. Instead, we could only use the cost of the adult tickets (£54.40) towards the upgrade.
In this light it becomes obvious why Historic Royal Palaces don’t offer a dedicated family ticket. If they did there would be a clear route from family ticket to family membership but instead they have designed a process that seems deliberate in its exploitation of families.
The ticket office staff were apologetic but their hands were tied, as was the person I spoke to on the Membership helpline. I can’t be the first person to be disappointed by this discovery and so it cannot be the case that Historic Royal Palaces have created this situation by accident. Indeed, the ticket office staff explained that had we purchased our tickets in person that morning then they would have recommended buying a membership outright to avoid this issue.
That seems fair enough and nicely helpful. But there’s a problem here.
When we went on the website that morning everything had encouraged us to book in advance. Ticket availability was showing as yellow (rather than green, although not red) and we didn’t want to travel over an hour to wind up being disappointed.
So we booked online.
And then when we went through that process there were no prompts or nudges towards considering a family membership during the booking process. Had there been, we might well have made a different decision from the outset, just like we would had we stood in line at the ticket office.
The higher price of convenience: a classic ‘dark pattern’
Historic Royal Palaces know exactly what they’re doing here. They’re deploying what is known as a “dark pattern” – a design choice that subtly pushes a user toward an action that benefits the company, often at the expense of transparency.
The screenshot above shows today’s status at the Tower of London. If you’re planning a day out today then there’s no way you’re opting to wait until you get to the ticket office to buy a ticket.
And although there is a link to membership prices when you look at the tickets and prices page, once you’re locked into the flow of buying a ticket there’s nothing to show you the value of signing up for membership instead.
And for almost any family, especially a family visiting the Tower of London, where tickets are more expensive and our day out would have cost £104.40, then annual membership offers fantastic value.
Family membership for 2 adults and up to 6 named children costs £110 (when paid by direct debit). And for that you get unlimited access to Hampton Court, the Tower of London, Kensington Palace and Hillsborough Castle and Gardens. That’s only £20 more than it costs for joint membership yet you get to name six children. A great deal if any of these places are local.
However, if you don’t know that and you’re pre-booking your tickets in advance for a single day out then there’s every change you’ll end up feeling aggrieved.
Consider that hypothetical family of 2 adults and 6 children. It costs them £136 to pre-book for Hampton Court (or £174 at the Tower of London).
If like us, they turn up, enjoy their day and succumb to the marketing around the site so much that they decide to upgrade then that costs them an additional £55.60 (though £40.40 at the Tower where adult tickets are more expensive in the first place), bringing the total cost to £191.60 (£214.40 at the Tower of London).
If that same family had been encouraged to buy a membership upfront, as would have happened at the ticket office, then that’s £26 less than this family of 8 would have spent on the day itself (£64 at the Tower).
But it’s worse than that. Because child tickets aren’t taken off the membership price this hypothetical family ends up paying £81.60 (or a whopping £104.40 at the Tower) more than they should. I was told that this has to be the case otherwise it creates a situation where membership ends up being free. Which I’d argue kind of highlights the absurdity of a situation where people aren’t just automatically and proactively sold membership instead.
But obviously this is pure profit from Historic Royal Palaces’ point of view. From this hypothetical family they bank 74% more at Hampton Court and 95% more at the Tower of London.
And that, frankly, feels deceptive and criminal.
Now in our case the situation isn’t so extreme – the difference is an extra £27.20. It’s enough to be frustrating, especially when we booked ahead in good faith, and didn’t expect to need to be on our guard against a bad faith actor. And while it is still worth our upgrading the membership it leaves a pretty bad taste in the mouth.
Historic Royal Palaces should take a better approach
I understand Historic Royal Palaces are a charity, and I’m grateful for the important work they do to preserve these magnificent sites. However, this is no accident or an edge case in the way the policy works, it’s quite clearly a deliberate decision to generate extra income. The way this membership upgrade policy is structured is designed to catch families out, rather than support them in making the best choice.
Booking tickets online is supposed to be convenient, but it shouldn’t come with obscured costs or terms and conditions that ultimately leave families feeling shortchanged. If Historic Royal Palaces truly value their visitors, especially those with families, they shouldn’t be deploying such a sneaky tactic.
I think they should do three things to really be transparent and leave families feeling valued instead of exploited:
- Make child tickets eligible for an upgrade to membership, as well as adults.
- Introduce a family day ticket. Without it there’s no path from family ticket to family membership, creating this eligibility mismatch.
- Be more transparent about the best options during the online booking flow. A simple up-selling prompt for any basket containing child tickets, highlighting the opportunities of a family membership over individual day tickets, would make all the difference
This last point is a web design problem and something that could be done without changing the wider policy (even though I think they should). By advertising membership packages based on what people put into their basket I’d hazard a guess that Historic Royal Palaces would see a pretty good conversion rate from on the day purchases to annual membership with all the ‘stickability’ that provides for audience capture.
Final thoughts
We left Hampton Court Palace feeling cheated, and that’s not the lasting impression any visitor should have after what was otherwise a delightful day. By sharing this experience, I hope other families can avoid the same frustration, and that Historic Royal Palaces will reconsider how they handle this scenario, which is hardly an edge case.
Trustworthiness is crucial to customer experience. Families should feel welcomed and supported, not caught out by the fine print of deliberately sneaky terms.
A response from Historic Royal Palaces
Alongside this blog post I contacted Historic Royal Palaces to convey my disappointment. They have acknowledged that the design of the website is a problem, which they are looking to fix. It is a very classic failure of piecemeal service design though all blamed on technology (having multiple platforms), when the blame should lie on the lack of thinking about end to end journeys.
“…we absolutely agree with your point about being clearer in the purchase journey that families considering visiting more than one of our sites should consider purchasing membership, and I am sorry that the website is not more explicit about that as present. This is something we will address…we extensively promote the value of membership on the site currently and will look at further opportunities to do this, in a transparent way.
Currently our ticketing page – where the point of sale is – is hosted on a separate site that is operated on our behalf by our ticketing partner. We are midway through the process of moving our ticketing system onto a new platform and, once this piece of work is complete this Autumn, we will have much more flexibility to implement the changes you suggest. I hope that you will see improvements in the purchase journey from that point.”
Their response continues to double down on this dark pattern as being a commercial decision in the nature of their pricing structure, owing to the high costs of operating the palaces. I find the response unhelpful because the only people it leaves ‘worse off’, to use their language, are families but allows HRP to pocket a tidy sum from every family who falls foul of this pattern. The section in bold below, which I’ve highlighted, cuts to the heart of the problem I see. There shouldn’t be a situation where a family group buys daily tickets when it would be cheaper for them to buy annual membership.
“You’ve asked for a direct explanation for our pricing structure, and why only adult tickets can be redeemed against the cost of a family membership. The explanation necessarily starts with the fact that we are an independent, self-funded charity. Whilst we are accountable to DCMS we receive no direct funding from government, or indeed the Crown. It costs roughly £120 million a year to look after the six properties in our care and admissions income is our main source of revenue to meet that cost. We therefore have to make choices about price points and pricing structures that seek to balance affordability and public access with maintaining a financially sustainable charity.
The core of the answer to your question, however, lies in the complex relationship between a single membership price, the variety of day admissions charges to each palace and – to an extent – the variety of ways a ‘family’ group can be made up. The nature of a membership product is that it’s one ‘ticket’ providing entry to all our sites. However, whilst there is a single membership price, we charge different admissions prices at each palaces – because of the different visitor experiences offered. This means that at some of our sites, for some family group sizes, the cost of admission will exceed the cost of membership, meaning that a direct upgrade would leave the charity worse off. That is a position that we can’t afford to be in. Whilst a solution could be to push up the price of membership, or reduce the number of children entitled to free access as part of a family membership, we don’t really want to do that and have therefore landed on the approach that has, in this case, frustrated you.“