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I kind of disagree with your premise here, at least in some specifics. MoMA and The Met in NYC absolutely do have a draw for foreign tourists, and are full of t

I kind of disagree with your premise here, at least in some specifics. MoMA and The Met in NYC absolutely do have a draw for foreign tourists, and are full of them. Both require tourists to pay the full ticket price to get in. LA too has serious museums that attract international tourists. DC similarly has a huge number of museums that draw in foreign tourists, it's just that they're almost all Smithsonian museums, which are free to everyone.

derefr 3y ago
My argument is that the foreign tourists who visit these places would be visiting NYC either way, and are just visiting these sites while they're in NYC, with something else having drawn them there. These sites are serving as part of a portfolio of factors that make NYC an interesting place to visit, but they don't manage to draw tourists all on their own in a way where reducing the ticket price to them would make a foreign tourist more likely to book a flight to America as a whole, just to go to NYC, just to go to that site. Consider the "gap-year" 20-something who "travels Europe" by just staying in each country a few days to visit the cultural sites while staying at a hostel. To such a person, the equivalent cultural sites in the US are basically inaccessible. (Not that such a person is the sort of high-hospitality-ROI that a city would plan around; but their presence as a "keystone species" indicates that a hospitality-loss-led economy is functioning the way it should.)