October 2025 results from the Cultural Enterprises Commercial Performance Barometer are now live, following responses from 130 cultural venues across the UK and Ireland. Key findings for this month include:
- Average admissions 1% down on October 2024
- Charging venues driving the fall at -2%
- Free venues doing better at +1%
- Exhibitions and events continue to do the heavy-lifting
- Catering performing above a slightly rebounding retail.
As we reach the latter part of 2025, October gave us more of the same, with admissions slightly below the same period in 2024. The fall is driven by charging venues down by 2%, and more positive for free venues, where admissions are +1%. The difference in fortunes for free and charging venues, marks a diversion from previous ‘school holiday’ months implying families are either still cutting back after the summer or saving for Christmas.
There is evidence of cut-backs elsewhere – ‘essential venue spend’ such as catering (SPV +9%) continuing to perform above retail (SPV +4%) – a pattern we have seen every month this year. As one venue put it:
“People were definitely spending on must haves like trails , crafts and café visits more than they were spending with the retail this half term.”
As in previous months, programming continues to be important – 28% mentioning it as a positive influence on their commercial performance (the single biggest factor overall), National Galleries of Scotland’s Goldsworth exhibition a shining example.
“Goldsworthy Exhibition results were outstanding. Catalogue reprinted. High margin achieved due to generosity of the artist. Ticket sales for the exhibition have been very high with 92k visitors over the whole programme.”
We also sense that commercial teams are getting better at convincing decision-makers of the importance of programming in driving the bottom line.
“While the external landscape remains tricky, I’m feeling much more positive that our programming is closely aligned with our audience which should support secondary spend. Programming that supports Commercial for us is critical.”
However, others highlighted the strain of creating new content just to get people to visit.
“The Commercial and Learning teams (three people) have worked really hard the past few weeks. And we’ve opened a new exhibition – it’s too soon to say how this will do in comparison with the previous one but it seems to be doing okay all considered. It has felt like we have to do a great deal more work to actually get people out to attend things (and just visit in general).”
Back to the positives, despite tracking behind catering, retail SPV has now been in line with inflation for two consecutive months, a number of venues attributing this to the success of seasonal product ranges.
“Strong performance particularly across Halloween products ranges, despite pressures on visitor numbers over half term”
“Sales were up on 2024, which may be due to the revised Christmas retail offer.”
With the Christmas season well and truly upon us, lets hope a combination of events and festive cheer will boost revenue further.
Where to find out more
Members can learn much more via the Association’s online dashboard where you can filter by sub-group and merge months. You can also read examples of best practice in our sentiment dashboard – please do check out both links.
The Association has now had more than 250 sites contribute to the Barometer and is looking forward to continuing to grow this service in the coming months. Members can expect the latest survey invite on the first Monday of each month.
For more information about the Commercial Performance Barometer please contact tom@culturalenterprises.org.uk or jon.young@decisionhouse.co.uk.
