Half of the most-visited museums worldwide in 2022 were situated in the United Kingdom or the United States according to the most recent issue of the Theme Index and Museum Index report by the Themed Entertainment Association and researchers at AECOM. However, the Louvre remained at the top with 7.7 million annual visitors. The Parisian art museum, probably best known for housing da Vinci's Mona Lisa, has ranked first regarding attendance since the 2012 edition of the report started including museums, with one exception in 2016. Even with the overall visitor numbers recovering from the coronavirus pandemic dip, almost all top-ranking museums still struggle to reach pre-pandemic attendance numbers.
For example, in 2019, 9.6 million people visited the Louvre. The 7.7-million figure from 2022 therefore represents a 20 percent decrease compared to the last year before the classification of COVID-19 as a pandemic, even though numbers increased by 173 percent between 2021 and 2022. Other top museums still have a considerably longer way to go. The British Museum, which saw 4.1 million people visiting in 2022 was still 34 percent below 2019's attendance figures, while Tate Modern was off the mark by 36 percent or 2.2 million people.
Notably absent from this year's ranking are the four Chinese museums that claimed four out of the top five spots in 2021. As data from the report shows, attendance numbers for these institutions dropped between 2021 and 2022, which can easily explained by the People's Republic's strict zero-Covid policy in the corresponding year. Across the top museums in the Asia-Pacific region, one museum managed to attract more visitors in 2022 than in 2019: The National Museum of Korea in Seoul, which increased its attendance by 1.7 percent compared to pre-pandemic figures and managed to claim the seventh overall spot in this year's ranking.
