Venice reveals fee and mandatory reservation for excursionists

ROME –

Starting in January, Venice will force day-trippers to make reservations and pay a fee to visit the historic lagoon city, in a bid to better manage visitors who often outnumber residents in the historic center, clogging narrow streets and busy pedestrian bridges. crossing the channels.

Venice officials unveiled new rules for day trippers on Friday, which take effect on January 16, 2023.

Tourists who choose not to spend the night in hotels or other accommodations will need to register online for the day they plan to come and pay a fee. These range from 3 to 10 euros ($3.15 to $10.5) per person, depending on how early you book and whether it’s high season or the city is very crowded.

Violators risk fines of up to 300 euros ($315) if they are caught and cannot prove they booked and paid with a QR code.

Approximately four fifths of all tourists come to Venice for the day only. In 2019, the last full year of tourism before the pandemic, some 19 million day trippers visited Venice, providing only a fraction of the income of those who stayed at least one night.

Venice’s tourism commissioner has dismissed any suggestion that the move would seek to limit the number of outsiders coming to Italy’s most visited city.

“We will not talk about cutting numbers. We are talking about incentives and disincentives,” Simone Venturini told a news conference in Venice.

The reserve and fee approach was discussed a few years ago, but was put on hold during the pandemic. COVID-19 travel restrictions have seen tourism in Venice all but disappear, allowing Venetians to have their city virtually to themselves for the first time in decades.

Mass tourism began in the mid-1960s. Visitor numbers continued to rise, while the number of Venetians living in the city steadily decreased, overwhelmed by congestion, the high cost of delivering food and other goods in Venice without cars and the frequent floods that damage homes and businesses.

Since guests of hotels and pensions already pay a lodging tax, they are exempt from the reservation and fee obligation.

With the new rule, Venice aims to “find this balance between (Venetians) residents and visitors in the short and long term,” Venturini said, promising that the new system “will be easy for visitors to manage.” He introduced Venice as the first city in the world to implement such a system for day visitors.

The tourism official expressed hope that the fee and reservation obligation “will reduce friction between day visitors and residents.” In the peak tourism system, tourists may outnumber residents 2 to 1, in the city measuring 5 square kilometers (2 sq mi) in area.

Venice’s resident population in the historic city numbers just over 50,000, a tiny fraction of what it was a couple of generations ago.

Exceptions to day traveler rates include children under the age of 6, people with disabilities, and owners of vacation apartments in Venice, as long as they can prove they pay property taxes.

Cruise ships contribute to the hordes of visitors that swarm Venice’s labyrinth of narrow streets, especially near St. Mark’s Square, when they disembark day-trippers for a few hours. Those visitors will also have to pay, unless their cruise company pays a flat rate to Venice.

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