Vancouver's PNE will cut the cost of admission and parking and close down for two days because of declining attendance, officials confirmed on Tuesday.

The cost of adult admission will fall from $20 to $16, while children under 13 will be admitted for free. Onsite parking will also be cut from $20 to $16.

The fair will close Monday Aug. 19 and Monday Aug. 26, but will be open on the final Monday, Sept. 2, which is the Labour Day holiday.

Spokesperson Laura Ballance says the first two Mondays have the lowest attendance for the fair and it's not the first time the idea of closing them has been proposed.

"We've looked at an industry trend in the United States, which actually sees more of the long-running fairs closing on the lower attendance days of the year.”

The PNE has struggled since posting relatively good attendance numbers during the fair's 100th anniversary in 2010 when there were 940,000 visitors.

The 2011 attendance dipped to just more than 800,000 and last year, it dropped to 760,000.

“We've been very up front about the fact we didn't achieve the attendance we had anticipated going into the [2012] fair, or that we had hoped for and were working toward," said Ballance.

The PNE is owned by the City of Vancouver and run as a non-profit charity.

With files from the CBC's Robert Zimmerman and Charmaine De Silva