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After delays and passionate protests, Venice will become the world’s first city to charge day trippers entry this month. Ahead of the pilot’s launch, councillors said other cities could learn from Venice’s experiment, while critics said the scheme was doomed to failure.Each year around 30 million visitors flood Venice, a Unesco world heritage site and home to fewer than 50,000 people. The onslaught has pushed locals to the mainland as they flee rising rents and tourist-clogged streets. Two thirds of visitors are day trippers, who add little to the local economy, according to official statistics.Day trippers will now need to pay €5 to enter Venice between 8.30am and 4pm on elected days. The pilot will be active on 29 days between 25 April—the feast day of St Mark, Venice’s patron saint—and 14 July, including on most weekends. Visitors will need to download a QR code that may be checked by controllers patrolling key entry points such as the Santa Lucia train station and Piazzale Roma car park. Transgressors risk fines of between €50 and €300.Residents, homeowners, students and workers, including commuters, are exempt from the scheme. Children under 14, people in need of care, and visitors staying in rented accommodation and hotels – who already pay a tourist tax of between €1 and €5 per night – will need to book their visits, but they are exempt from the fee. People who are solely visiting Venice’s islands, including the Lido and Murano, will not need to pay the charge. By 6 March, nearly 5,000 people had pre-paid the fee, while 23,000 of those who are exempt had logged their presence, officials told The Art Newspaper.Simone Venturini, Venice’s tourism chief, admits that the scheme, which cost €3m, is not a “magic bullet”, but predicts it could dissuade some “hit and run” visitors from booking holidays on the busiest days of the year. Controllers, who will number between 50 and 60 at any one time, will show leniency during the trial, allowing those without a QR code to download one while still within a “buffer zone” near entry points, he adds. Data collected by the Smart Control Room, where operators monitor tourists’ movements with video cameras and mobile phone data, will help assess the scheme’s impact, allowing it to be tweaked in the future.The charge was born after Italy passed a law in 2019 allowing Venice to introduce a day trippers’ tax of up to €10. Plans to charge up to €10 from that year were dropped during the pandemic, and a similar scheme for last year was delayed so the system could be perfected. When councillors voted by 24 votes to 10 in September to introduce the new €5 charge, the city hall erupted into a scene of screaming councillors accusing Mayor Luigi Brugnaro of damaging the city and angry protestors brandishing banners.Giuseppe Saccà, an opposition councillor for the centre-left Democratic Party, says it is “shameful” that Venice is becoming the world’s first pay-to-enter city. Government officials have also criticised the move. Daniela Santanché, the tourism minister, said at a February event: “I don’t agree with using taxation to manage tourism.” She added: “It’s better for a service to cost more than a tax [that] gives nothing in return.”While other destinations have introduced taxes to manage over-tourism – including Bhutan, the small nation in the Himalayas, which charges visitors $200 a day, and the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, which charges $18.80—they have usually been included in accommodation costs or visa fees. Venice will be the first city to charge visitors to enter.Difficult to enforceSaccà said the scheme is “messy and jumbled”, arguing it would make life “impossible” for working Venetians, and predicts it “cannot be enforced”. Instead, he says, Venice should create packages of services for tourists, including transport and museum tickets, with variable prices depending on the period to regulate visitor flows. In Saccà’s view, the new charge is a money-making scheme designed to dissuade Unesco from putting Venice on its blacklist. (In September last year, Unesco voted not to include Venice on the endangered list but said “further progress still needs to be made”). Saccà also accuses Brugnaro of doing nothing to counter over-tourism.Venturini argues that Brugnaro’s administration has made progress: since the Covid-19 pandemic, when tourist numbers plummeted, it has limited the opening of new hotels, bars, restaurants and souvenir shops, worked with the government to ban cruise ships from the historic centre, and announced a 25-person limit on tour groups. He predicted that Venice would soon reap rewards. “The trend is changing,” he says.He adds that the scheme would be a boon for visitors to the Venice Biennale, who tend to stay in the city for more than one day. “There will be less pressure on the city,” he said. “For whoever decides to sleep in the city, it will be more beautiful, more liveable.”During a November press conference, Michele Zuin, Venice’s finance chief, brushed off accusations that the charge was about money-making, saying it was expected to generate €700,000—far less than invested.Claudio Vernier, the president of the Piazza San Marco association, a local heritage protection group, says the tax is a good idea but visitors should pay a higher fee of €10. Just 10% of tourists visit Venice’s civic museums, meaning they contribute little to cultural institutions, Vernier says. He suggests that funds raised with a higher charge could be used to restore heritage in the city.But Giovanni Leone, the president of Do.Ve, a Venetian merchants and artisans association, views the tourist tax as ineffectual. Instead, the council should clamp down on holiday lets, now that hotels, B&Bs and rented apartments in the historic centre have the capacity to host 50,000 tourists overnight—more than Venetian residents—he says. He is critical of Brugnaro for not taking advantage of a national law passed in 2022 allowing Venice to limit the number of holiday lets. “If we implement this measure we will open the way for other cities blighted by over-tourism,” Leone says.
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