The question really is whether the existence of the queen is what provides continued value for buckingham palace — without the monarchy, it becomes another relic of a bygone era, with no inherent quality to attract tourists beyond its history and aesthetic. Visiting a “live” structure is an altogether different thing — this is where the queen lives vs this is where a queen once lived (as opposed to all the other places kings and queens have lived)

Counterargument: all those grandiose empty buildings. People still come to see our Place of the Parliament in Bucharest and ain't nobody bringing back Ceaușescu :-))

The question isn’t whether people would visit, but rather do they visit more because of the queen’s existence. That is, would be worth a billion rather than billions

That's probably impossible to quantify. The example next door, Versailles, kind of says you don't need a living monarch.

>That's probably impossible to quantify

Sure, but that's the metric you need to go by if you want to evaluate the tourism value of a "living" monarchy.

That tourists would continue to exist with or without the queen doesn't really tell us anything useful. It's a question of how many.

The late author JG Ballard once suggested that the monarchy should be abolished, but that the British government should work with Disney to have lifelike robotic replicas made. Cheaper in the long run, and Disney World is quite popular after all.

Sure, this is why nobody is visiting the Versailles or the Winter Palace.