Hearst Castle gets good news on holiday tour, accreditation

Hearst Castle’s new Holiday Twilight Tour last year made the State Parks museum available to more than three times as many evening-tour visitors in 2015 as in previous holiday seasons, state officials said.

The new tours included the grounds of William Randolph Hearst’s former estate, the Casa del Mar guesthouse and the extensively decorated grand social rooms on the ground floor of La Casa Grande, the hilltop compound’s main house. Hearst Castle encompasses 127 acres and more than 20,000 treasured works of art, some of them centuries old.

The twilight tour’s theme focused on how the Hearst family celebrated Christmas and the holidays when they were at the Castle. The tours ran from Dec. 19 through Jan. 2, excluding holidays — 11 days in all.

“If we had scheduled our standard night-tour program, we could have served a maximum of 3,564 visitors,” according to Ty Smith, chief of museum interpretation. With the Holiday Twilight Tour program, “we tripled our capacity. We ended up selling 97 percent of our offerings, for a total of 10,718 tickets.”

And, “even with that increase in capacity, on most nights, we still ended up turning some people away,” he added.

Those extra visitors also translated into revenue, said Dan Falat, superintendent of the State Parks district that includes Hearst Castle. He estimated that it cost about $30,000 for time, additional staffing and extra equipment to run the holiday tours, which generated a gross income of about $190,000.

The holiday tours, at 75 minutes long, were 15 minutes shorter than the traditional evening tours, which enabled the Castle to offer more of them: 16 to 20 a night, instead of six. Each holiday tour could handle 54 people in one group, rather than 54 people on evening tours who get split into three separate groups (because smaller, upper-level rooms were included in the evening tours).

Museum Director Mary Levkoff said reaction to the new tour was “thrilling … a lot of people in town, people who had been to the Castle before, said the new tour put them in the mood for holiday spirit.”

Museum accreditation

The Castle got more good news when it received word that it had been been accredited for a second time by the American Alliance of Museums. The accreditation lasts for 10 years. The other California museum recognized by AAM is the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

The accreditation “is a big deal … it’s very prestigious,” Levkoff said. “It means we’re not just a tourist attraction. We’re also an accredited museum, and that’s something to be proud of.”

She said accreditation is achieved through a “rigorous, peer-reviewed procedure” that takes into account a museum’s collections, as well as the safety of staff and visitors, financial stability and educational merit, among other factors.

AAM says only 1,056 of the nation’s estimated 35,000 museums are accredited, and achieving that status again took the cooperation and work of the entire staff at Hearst Castle.

Community involvement and outreach are other important factors in being accredited. As part of the process, Levkoff met with Vicki Schumacher (superintendent of the Coast Unified School District), Coast Union High School Principal Jonathan Sison, representatives of local parent-teacher associations and chambers of commerce, and other community leaders.

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 10:31 AM with the headline "Hearst Castle gets good news on holiday tour, accreditation."