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Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen
Not only an iconic building
Location: Rotterdam – Netherlands
Project type: Amusement Parks and Water Parks
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam is not only an iconic building, it also offers visitors behind-the-scenes glimpses of how a museum works. In order to give the public easy access to the different parts of the art depot, the organisation now uses Vintia solutions. For Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen this is the ideal way to keep control over the ticketing activities with limited resources.
Museums often exhibit only a fraction of their collection, usually storing the rest in warehouses that are closed to the public. Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen decided to do things differently. Since 2021, the building is the first publicly accessible art depot, unique in the world.
The Depot is situated next to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam’s Museumpark and preserves a range of private and corporate art collections. As a visitor, you can take a look behind the scenes of the museum. The iconic building has fourteen compartments with climate control, fitted with shelves, racks and cabinets for over 150,000 artworks. The humidity and temperature in the depot compartments are kept stable.
“Even with our small-scale team, everything is easy to manage. And that translates into happy customers.”
Daniel Bouw, Head of Marketing and Communication
The challenge
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen strives to offer its visitors a unique and comfortable visitor experience. The strict and varied climate conditions in the different art compartments, however, do not allow for a normal museum visit. The duration of the visit and number of simultaneous visitors in these compartments are in fact limited, which is why the depot was looking for a system to control visitor flows by means of time slots. Moreover, visitors had to be able to book these time slots easily onlineSolution: fast and efficient sales via different channels.
The solution
For their online ticket sales, Depot Boijmans van Beuningen relies on Vintia’s Enviso Ticketing widgets. These widgets can be set up quickly and flexibly on various web pages and guide the customers easily through their purchase. “Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen has continued to work with time slots until now,” says Daniël Bouw, Head of Marketing and Communication. “It’s a system we installed in COVID times, but after the pandemic time slots and capacity management also seemed useful to us to guide visitor flows through the depot’s specific layout in a practical way.
“Group bookings are also possible via the webshop, and the depot is currently working on an educational offer for groups and schools, for which several widgets are now online. The organisation can also easily manage rates and discounts, which is not unimportant given the fact that approximately 85% of visitors have a discount card or pass. At the entrance of the depot, employees quickly and easily scan the tickets for access control. The organisation also uses Vintia’s POS solutions for the restaurants and shop.
An efficient helpdesk is indispensable for a good customer experience. By using Vintia’s managed e-commerce services, Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is always ready for its customers, without having to invest in a support team itself. An experienced team of Vintia customer service professionals takes over that task and handles rebookings, refunds and other customer queries. In addition to telephonic support, support is also provided via e-mail and chatbot.
“During the COVID period with its mandatory closures, we often had to deal with rebookings,” says Peter de Jonge, ICT manager. “That is quite time-consuming and therefore we could not do it properly ourselves. As an organisation, we want to evolve towards a fully digital ticketing environment, without physical cash registers. However, we have to make this transition gradually, because not all target groups are familiar with digital tools. Moreover, we also regularly receive questions about how we operate as a museum repository. For all those questions, the Vintia’s managed e-commerce service is an ideal partner.”
“Thanks to the solutions of Vintia, we can better control our ticket sales and optimise our operating costs,” says Peter de Jonge. “Now that we manage everything ourselves with Vintia’s solutions, we are also able to react more quickly to changes. The major strength of Vintia is that it offers multiple solutions: online ticket sales, operation of shop and restaurants; everything is taken care of in the same application, and it is easy to control and manage.”
“We are very satisfied with Vintia’s solutions,” says Daniël Bouw. “Even with our small-scale team, everything is easy to manage. And that translates into happy visitors.
“Peter de Jonge: “Vintia is very committed. Our online ticketing system was implemented in a very short time and Vintia thinks along with us to further enhance the user experience for our employees. At the same time, we are consulted for innovation projects and can share our input for the future of Vintia. I am already looking forward to the next generation of ticketing solutions from Vintia.”