Dome boom fails to materialise

Millennium Dome attendance figures are still failing to take off despite longer opening hours being introduced this month, it was revealed today.

A total of 136,635 tourists visited the £758 million attraction in Greenwich, south east London, in the seven-day period from April 10-16, the New Millennium Experience Company said.

This was slightly down on the April 3-9 seven-day total of 137,404 and well short of the record seven-day figure of 178,047 achieved during the school half-term holidays from February 21-27.

NMEC had hoped to see a boom in visitor numbers after scrapping the 10am-6pm opening time, changing it to 9am to 8pm at the beginning of April, and introducing extended opening until 11pm on Fridays, Saturdays and Bank Holidays.

The company has also brought in a half-price offer of £10 admission for visitors attending in the evenings and has launched a more spectacular ending to the show that takes place in the Dome's central area.

"We are not going to get the really big numbers until the summer holidays begin," said an NMEC spokesman today.

He went on: "We are going to get the vast majority of our visitors in the last six months of the year."

The April 10-16 figures, which included 15,563 children on free school trips, took the total number of visitors to the Dome to 1,812,752. NMEC is still confident of reaching its break-even target of 10 million admission-paying visitors in the year 2000.