1. Gilded ghosts at the Biltmore estate

The Biltmore experience is tied to the Vanderbilt experience, and the Vanderbilt experience is class and wealth. The Biltmore markets itself as “America’s Largest Home,” with promotion focusing on the home’s grandeur and the former resident’s prosperous lifestyle.Footnote ² Advertisements and wares for sale in gift shops promote the glamor of the Vanderbilt family, enrapturing the visitor as a “guest of the Vanderbilts.” The attainment of vast wealth through hard work created the American dream: now, the marketing touts, you are invited into this sumptuous home as an esteemed guest to revel in this dream—for a price.

My visit to the Biltmore was a mixed bag. As a lover of art and history, I was excited to experience the collections and stories held within the hallowed grounds of the estate, which was intensely beautiful. Taking time off from a busy retail position to visit, this was a once-in-a-lifetime visit for me, and a bit of a splurge. I was fortunate enough that I could put money and time aside to head out to Asheville and take in the sights, but money was tight on my salary, and I prepared to take in everything I could. There is a desire, when investing in a trip that runs on the expensive or luxurious side, to make certain you are enjoying every minute.

Consider a Saturday in the Summer when many families have time to vacation. For a single adult ticket on Saturday, June 20, 2026, the highest-priced ticket—including two-day house and garden access, complimentary audio tour of the Biltmore house, and a specialized 90-minute group tour with “rarely accessed” areas—comes out to $345.00 per adult.Footnote ³ The next package, including house access, audio guide, garden access, Luminiere light show, and wine tasting, arrives at $160. The lowest-priced house ticket, including house access, audio guide, wine tasting, and garden access, is $110. At the time of my visit a few years ago, the cheapest ticket offered garden access only for $85. Where this lowest range offers a semblance of access, the highest-tiered tickets provide the upper-crust experience. But that’s not all. For additional experiences, there are add-ons consisting of anything from additional tours to chocolate and wine tastings, mostly in the $45 to $75 range per individual.Footnote ⁴ “Imagine yourself a Vanderbilt guest as you explore the house in the quiet morning hours,” boasts an add-on experience for a breakfast at the house with a guided tour.

While $45 is not much to some, to a visitor making under $30,000 a year, the original ticket price itself is a huge splurge. That $45 could be spent on food or part of their lodging on a trip like this: supplementing the estate is a winery, several hotels, restaurants, and gift shops. These charges rack up quickly, and for economy visitors this can overwhelm their budget, leaving extras such as these tours an insurmountable luxury. Additional expenses loom over the guest experience, as described on a travel blog discussing how to best explore on a budget: “Biltmore … is all about priorities. Perhaps a specialty tour is more important …than eating on the estate…. Perhaps you don’t need a souvenir budget. You can get lots of photos … instead from your specialty tour.”Footnote ⁵

The tour of the Biltmore mansion is only available once a day on the booked date, at a set time. There are no options for repetition. I felt bad that I could not lose myself in the glamour of the Vanderbilts like some of my peers, but I could not shake the thought: these rooms are beautiful, but if it were me back then, I would have been serving in them. My family had spent their time during America’s Gilded Age as lighthouse keepers, farmers, and fishermen. I asked a friend if she felt put off by the displays of wealth; for her, it was a form of escapism. The Biltmore certainly provides escape in beautiful settings and welcoming staff; however, the more I tallied up the dollar amount of everything I was missing out on, the more I identified with the waitstaff who once served in those halls. The estate prioritizes the magnificence of the Vanderbilts, making the working-class members of the household feel like an aside.

As the weather reached into the upper nineties, I pressed on in the gardens, exhausted, feeling that I needed to see it all before closing. When I was too tired to feel up to a wine tasting my ticket had included, I inwardly chided myself for the waste. When the rooms displaying the working-class residents were mentioned only briefly at the end of the tour, I was disappointed. When I later discovered that there was a separate “Backstairs” tour regarding the lives of house staff for an additional $45 a person, I could not believe it.

Programming at the Biltmore leans towards the upper class, glamorizing the bourgeois owners of the home rather than focusing on the communities of the working-class inhabitants. Historic house museums frequently relegate the stories of the working class to roles of lesser importance.Footnote ⁶ As much as Gilded Age media such as Titanic and Downton Abbey have glamourized the upper crust and nouveau riche, they have also given viewers a chance to empathize with and view working-class stories from this time. According to Lauren Henry, Curator of Interpretation at the Biltmore, as of 2023, the Backstairs Tour has surpassed other long-running tours in popularity through ticket sales.Footnote ⁷ The demand for stories encompassing a variety of the lives that coexisted at the Biltmore is evident. “In modern society, where most people are responsible for doing their own household labor, often in addition to demanding paid work,” Jennifer Putstz writes, “People can relate better to … working class than the wealthy.”Footnote ⁸ Including servant’s quarters at the end of a tour relegates the working class to an afterthought in the domicile.Footnote ⁹ For working-class visitors or visitors interested in a holistic story of those who lived at the Biltmore, this sequencing prioritizes the wealthy in storytelling. Those who wish to see working-class stories represented have to pay extra for the privilege.

Visiting the Biltmore is marketed as a way for visitors to attain a glimpse of the vast luxury the homeowners enjoyed. By purchasing the “first class” experience, the visitor becomes the museum analog to the Vanderbilts’ high social strata, gaining a taste of that lifestyle by sharing in the small powers that money can buy. Meanwhile, the budget-constrained visitor is excluded from experiences piece-by-piece while viewing others partaking in full—a class stratification in the modern museum experience at the estate that eerily echoes the class stratification in the society that the museum commemorates. With each add-on that they cannot afford, the budget visitor begins to identify with the lower-to-middle classes of the Gilded Age. The Biltmore’s mission focuses on preserving the past: its marketing and prices accomplish this inadvertently, unintentionally preserving not only the home but also a recreated version of Gilded Age social strata.

2. Class systems from society to museums

Museums have been inherently associated with class from their origins. Early conceptions of museums in the Western world began as collections of the wealthy, evolving from private collections to more public spaces.Footnote ¹⁰ The opening of private museums to the public, such as the Louvre around the Enlightenment period, was deemed for the benefit of the masses by imparting culture to a group implied to be uncultured by default.Footnote ¹¹ In this way museums and social class have always been linked, and addressing discrepancies is the first step in increasing accessibility.

Scholarship on admission prices at historic house museums in the United States is slim. We can, however, find research on other museums, where pricing and inclusion are issues. A 2023 study of museum participants concluded that across demographics, cost was a common factor of exclusion.Footnote ¹² In a 2024 study from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), 41 percent of occasional museum visitors said cost was the main barrier to museum attendance, making this one of the highest barriers in museum visitation.Footnote ¹³ College-educated households spend much more per year on museums than families without degrees: college-educated households spend in the thousands per year on average, while families with lower or no post-high school education spend amounts in the low hundreds per year.Footnote ¹⁴ Sending a family of three from a working-class background to the Biltmore at the lowest ticket option would surpass the total most families spend in a year on museum admissions. Another researcher found similar data: when asking if high admission is a barrier to museum entry, those in higher income brackets ranked the issue of high admission at 0 out of 9, while lower income respondents placed it at 8.1 out of 9.Footnote ¹⁵ These studies illustrate a dramatic shift in financial barriers to entry across class lines. With high admission consistently labeled as a barrier to entry, a museum with few options for working-class budgets becomes exclusionary by nature.

In our society, tiered experiences are nothing new. Pricing for entertainment such as concerts, for example, are tiered, with VIP tickets and nosebleed seats. Hotels and airplane tickets provide vastly different expectations based on pricing. Even our online world includes this model, with sites and apps providing “premium” versions at a price. We come to expect tiered experiences in fields such as entertainment and travel. Where most people do not expect it is at an educational site such as a museum.

Museums are thought to be educational in nature, holding items and information in trust for the public to access. As of 2022, ICOM defines a museum as a

An inaccessible museum rubs many of us the wrong way, but is the Biltmore even a museum?

The Biltmore is an edge case: it is owned by the Biltmore Company, in the hands of the descendants of the Vanderbilt family, and is not classified as a non-profit. It needs to turn a profit for upkeep of the site. Nevertheless, the average visitor is unlikely to analyze an entity’s tax status or measure historic sites up to the ICOM definition before visiting, and guides and articles refer to the Biltmore as a historic house museum. The Biltmore promotes itself as preserving and teaching history, but also as a luxury vacation event. If this analysis allows us to question the Biltmore’s museum status, however, it also allows us to observe that museums may not be as removed from tiered social conventions such as class systems as we might like.

3. Historic house museums and visitor class systems

Economic bubbles have grown and popped, and tastes have changed over the past century, but the skeleton of class systems remains largely unchanged. In a society that prioritizes the experiences and goals of the wealthy, class struggles are felt in the everyday. Certain spaces blend class systems of the past with our current era. Historic house museums are one such space. Beyond the Biltmore, other museums can create a social strata and exclusion of the working class through pricing and programming. Any museum using pricing tiers that create a feeling of exclusivity also, by definition, creates exclusion.

Colonial Williamsburg, for example—founded by an industrialist family, the Rockefellers—uses exclusive pricing, albeit at a much lower rate, and possesses a workaround. Colonial Williamsburg offers tickets based on single- or multi-day visits at around $37 to $55, as well as providing discounted tickets to local visitors. Add-ons such as ghost tours are not included admission tickets, as at Biltmore, and can be experienced à la carte. Yet it is a preserved town: while most building access is reserved for ticketed patrons, anyone may walk the streets of Colonial Williamsburg and still get a feel for the historic area, speaking to costumed interpreters and patronizing historic shops, unlike the Biltmore Estate, which charges a fee to walk the grounds. Outdoor programming ensures even non-paying visitors may still participate. Duke of Gloucester Street, the main thoroughfare of Colonial Williamsburg, is a beloved area for tourists and locals alike to enjoy, giving Colonial Williamsburg less the feel of gated luxury and more the feel of a local haunt. It is not uncommon to run into local runners, dog-walkers, and bikers on Duke of Gloucester Street while walking around the historic site. With these options, Colonial Williamsburg, while also ticketed, offers more for the working-class visitor than the Biltmore.

Generally, there are a few pricing options for museums. The dual-tiered option, such as Colonial Williamsburg, is one. Another more common option is the single flat-fee museum, such as the Poe Museum in Richmond, or the International Spy Museum in DC. Free museums, such as the Smithsonian Museums in DC, or the many free admission museums in London such as the Tate or Victoria and Albert, provide financial access to anyone. Finally, there are structured tier models, such as the Tenement Museum in New York, which prices each apartment tour separately, in a multi-apartment site.

In this way, the Tenement Museum is comparable to the Biltmore. A difference lies in that as a museum that chooses to focus on the working classes, the Tenement Museum interprets the history of immigrants to America by preserving homes that were not solely bourgeois spaces. Their discussion not only encompasses the past immigrants to this country, but also current immigration.Footnote ¹⁷ Pricing begins at a lower rate than the Biltmore, $30 per apartment. While the Tenement Museum is similar to the Biltmore with respect to paying additional fees for different stories, the prioritization of working-class stories gives the Tenement Museum more working-class representation through programming.

In sum, for pricing, there are four main models that museums utilize:

1. 1. The free entry model, in which visitation and access to exhibits is free of charge for all.

2. 2. The flat fee, which charges a set fee for access to the museum.

3. 3. The two-tiered museum admission system provides pricing options: a lower- and higher-priced ticket that includes more to experience.

4. 4. The add-on system: a fee for museum access with several additional experiences provided by further ticket purchases.

Add-on pricing structures such as those exhibited by the Biltmore prevent historic house museums from becoming fully inclusive to a ready audience. High prices on their own exclude lower-income visitors, and a stratified pricing system recreates the class systems of the era it represents through pricing. Accessibility can be provided through lower pricing options but also must be continued in available programming and interpretation that values working-class stories as much as the stories of the upper-class. Visitor class systems can only damage museums in the long run.