The Finnish Museum Card opens a travel agency – and it’s fully booked
People value museums. But when it comes to planning a trip, museums are easy to overlook. Research by the Finnish Museum Card shows that while interest in culture is high and growing, museums lose out at the moment that matters most – competitors offer seamless booking and a complete travel experience, while museums have had neither.
The Finnish Museum Card’s answer isn’t a campaign telling people museums matter. It’s a new cultural travel service designed to make museums feel like something you genuinely can’t afford to miss – and a brand experience built to prove it.
Developed with SEK, Museum Trips reframes the museum visit entirely. Rather than a standalone destination, the museum becomes the centrepiece of a richer journey – paired with dining, overnight stays and the chance to experience cultural institutions alongside some of Finland’s most recognisable public figures.
The campaign is engineered around scarcity and social proof: limited-edition trips hosted by dancer and choreographer, Jorma Uotinen and journalist and TV personality, Katja Ståhl, made deliberately hard to get. The celebrity-hosted trips sold out within minutes of launch. Because nothing signals desirability quite like demand you can’t ignore.
That desirability has a physical home. At Mall of Tripla – one of Helsinki’s busiest shopping destinations – the Finnish Museum Card opened a fully operational pop-up travel agency for the launch week. An actual travel agency with brochure racks, a service counter, bum bags by the till, and real queues. Styled as a classic high street travel shop – the kind that used to anchor every town centre before the internet made them disappear. The travel agency wasn’t a backdrop. It was the whole point – backed by an earworm jingle that leaned hard into 90s travel ad nostalgia. Shoppers no intention of visiting a museum find themselves leafing through brochures and reconsidering their cultural calendar.
‘The problem wasn’t awareness, but desire. Museums don’t lack value, they lack urgency,’ says Samuel Räikkönen, Creative Director at SEK. ‘We wanted to give museums a new role in people’s lives – not just somewhere to go, but something to want.’
‘Travel has always been about more than the destination – it’s about the anticipation, the company, the stories you bring home,’ says Anna Pirvola from the Finnish Museum Card. ‘Museum Trips brings that thinking into the museum world.’
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