One thing I like about England, and I think it is the same in the rest of the UK, is that museums are usually free admission. There are many specialist private ones that charge, of course, but all of the good public ones, the national and local and university ones, are all free admission.
I am not really a cheapskate, but have a limited attention span and there is only so many Mogdilianis I can look at before they all start looking the same. If you make it free, I can look at half a dozen, go out for a fag break and an ice-cream, come back and look at some more, perhaps come back the next day. I don't feel I have to "do" the museum all in one go,
I have spent many a happy half-hour in a back wing of the Museum of Natural History in Kensington while waiting for my date to arrive for an evening Prom at the Albert Hall, baffled about butteflies or bothered about beetles. The Fitzwilliam in Cambrige has a fantastic collection of impressionists , it is just amazing, they have monets and manets and pissaros and god knows what else. The Manchester Museum of Science and Technology is very good, although not as good as I remember it. Whitworth Museum in Manchester also very good. The V and A is pretty good too. There are some nice museums in Bristol, well pretty much all over the country really, you will find a museum on local history or something you've never heard of and spend a pleasant afternoon just looking at things and being amazed of how MUCH of the world there is, the drunkenness of things being various as MacNiece puts it.
Yet you don't get that when you have to pay. You feel somehow you have to get your money's worth. I tend to get museum fatigue after about an hour and a half, that is as much as I can take in at one go. At least, if you are going to charge, make it multiple entry.
Obviously private museums are a different thing, you have to pay to keep them up, and if you're not paying out of your taxes then you have to pay at the door. But publicly-owned museums should be free at the point of use. If we can't pay for museums and libraries, we are not the civilisation I thought we were. By all means put internet in them, put wheelchair ramps and loops for the deaf, braille guides and whatnot, make them as accessible and modern as you can, so that everyone can come and find and enjoy. The pittance, the absolute pittance, the UK spends on its museums makes me cry.
Don't be niggardly and try to charge foreign tourists who don't pay for them. They pay for them by spending their money, contributing to the economy in their taxes that they spend when they are not in the museum. Don't try to squeeze it that way. You can't have it be "Open to all, like the Ritz Hotel".
No, museums and libraries should be free. Stick free Internet in them, of course, amazingly the Internet is not yet like running water. In twenty years' time it will be, if you make it so. We are in the middle, perhaps nearer the start, of a marvellous knowledge revolution, but not everyone has a smartphone (I don't) and anyway you can't put a statue or see the brushstrokes on a smartphone. Free museums and libraries, please, Viktor, and I don't mind the price of the ice-cream or a little bit extra on my taxes.
God knows, Hungary doesn't bother to advertise to tourists at all. I don't know about US telly or Canada telly etc but around February, usually, there are spates of adverts for come to Canada, come to Australia, come to California, come to Croatia or the People's Republic of East Kebab, when people are booking their summer holidays. Never one for Hungary. I did an experiment once, I went to every tour operator and travel agent in Cambridge and asked for a brochure for Hungary.All you have at the moment is stag and hen do's, which is fine and dandy but you can do more than that, vik. Hungary is a wonderful country, why do we foreigners have to say so? Why don't you tell them? You got Rachel Appleby doing the announcements on the Budapest Metro in her sweet English accent, you got English signs everywhere, most people below the age of sixty or so do speak a bit of English and are fantastically happy to practice with a native English speaker, so much that it is hard to learn any Hungarian from them. You have this enormous tourist resource, Vik, and you are just wasting it. It's such a pity.