Entry into the car park and the house at Christmas always generates a lot of discussion. This year we operated a timed ticketing system in response to long queues into the house in 2023. The 2023 queues were exacerbated by terrible weather which meant that visitors were not able to spend as much time exploring our outdoor offer. The ticketing system we initiated this year for the house meant that the wait for the house rarely exceeded 30 minutes – the time slot allocated on each ticket. We also adapted our visitor welcome this year in response to queues to get into our visitor reception centre during the first few weeks, and we did successfully resolve this issue.
In the past we have used a pre-booking system for the property, but this didn’t work well at Mottisfont. This is partly due to the number of people we welcome, plus 77% of our visitors are members who pay to visit in advance via their National Trust memberships. This means our tickets have to be free at the point of booking which makes it difficult to stop people from booking multiple tickets over multiple days to get the best weather for their visit, or from booking more tickets for friends and family than the number of people who end up actually visiting.
We had between 20 per cent to 50 per cent ‘no shows’ per day, had to turn a lot of visitors away who didn’t book tickets, and had long queues of cars building up on the public highway as we welcomed each driver to check tickets or to talk through what to do if they didn’t have a ticket. Public safety and being as good a neighbour as we can to our residents are very important to us.
All the feedback we receive is taken into consideration when we’re reviewing busy seasons in our calendar and planning ahead, so we will look at all options for next year. We want to thank everyone who has visited us this festive season and for all the wonderful comments you have made. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank our fantastic staff and volunteers, who put in a huge amount of hard graft and goodwill to create a really magical experience.
Ben Haines,
Visitor Operations Manager,
Mottisfont
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