Venice has completed its pilot program to charge a 5 euro ($5.46) entrance fee to day trippers arriving on particularly crowded days, after opponents called the experiment a failure.
Authorities at the Italian destination, also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, introduced an entrance tax system in April, hoping to deter some visitors from going. The system was designed to manage the flow of tourists when visitor numbers are at their peak.
But on Saturday, several dozen activists gathered outside Santa Lucia train station overlooking a busy canal to protest the entrance fee, saying it was not deterring visitors from arriving on peak days as planned.
“The ticket is a failure, as the city’s data demonstrates,” said Giovanni Andrea Martini, an opposition member of the city council.
During the first 11 days of the trial period, an average of 75,000 visitors were recorded in the city. Martini said that was 10,000 more each day than during the three indicative holidays in 2023, citing figures provided by the city based on mobile phone data that tracks arrivals in the city.
Simone Venturini, city councilor for tourism and social cohesion, said the initial assessment of the program was positive and confirmed that the system would be renewed in 2025, but acknowledged that there were still many people.
“Some weekends there were fewer people than last year at the same time… but no one expected all the day-trippers to miraculously disappear,” he told Reuters news agency.
“It will be more effective in the coming years when we increase the number of days and increase the price,” he added, without specifying how much visitors might have to pay in 2025.
A proposal to double the fee to 10 euros ($10.92) is under consideration for next year, a city spokesman added.
“Making Venice a museum”
Over the past two and a half months, nearly 438,000 tourists have paid the entrance tax, generating revenue of some 2.19 million euros ($2.4 million), according to the Associated Press news agency, based on data provided by the city.
The tax was not applied to people staying in Venice hotels, who are already subject to a tourist tax. Children under 14, local residents, students, workers and people visiting relatives, among others, are also exempt.
Officials said the money would be used for essential services, which cost more in a city crisscrossed by canals, including trash removal and maintenance.
Opponents of the plan want policies that encourage repopulation of Venice’s historic center, which has been losing residents to the more convenient mainland for decades, including by imposing limits on short-term rentals.
“Wanting to increase this (entrance) price to 10 euros is totally useless. It makes Venice a museum,” Martini said.
Many of the banners displayed at Saturday’s protest also expressed growing concern about the electronic and video surveillance system the city implemented in 2020 to monitor the cellphone data of people arriving in the city, which forms the backbone of the tourism control system. The placards included warnings about the use of personal data and the lack of data privacy.
“The entrance ticket is a big distraction for the media, who only talk about these 5 euros, which will become 10 euros next year,” said Giovanni Di Vito, a Venice resident active in the campaign against the tourist tax.
“But no one is focusing on the system of surveillance and control of citizens.”
Martini instead advocated a free reservation system for visitor time slots to avoid excluding low-income families, but which would allow potential tourist arrivals to be tracked.
“We need to be able to warn people that if they come on certain days, they’re not going to have a good time,” he said, adding that the long-term goal should be to lure back long-term residents who have left the city in recent years as short-term rentals increasingly dominate the real estate market.
