- Venice ends 5-euro day visitor fee
- Critics call initiative a failure
- Activists protest at train station
- Fee generated 2.19M euros revenue
After critics labelled the initiative a failure, Venice has ended its experimental program of charging a 5-euro ($5.46) admission fee for day visitors arriving on extremely busy days.
In April, authorities in the well-known Italian site, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, imposed an admission fee to discourage some visitors. The method was created to regulate the flow of tourists when visitor numbers are highest.
However, on Saturday, several hundred activists gathered outside the Santa Lucia train station, overlooking a crowded canal, to protest the entrance price, claiming that it did little to deter visitors from visiting on peak days as planned.
“The ticket is a failure, as demonstrated by city data,” stated the opposition city council member Giovanni Andrea Martini.
During the first 11 days of the experiment, the city received an average of 75,000 visitors. Martini claimed it was 10,000 more per day than on three potential holidays in 2023, citing city numbers based on cellular data that records arrivals in the city.
Simone Venturini, the municipal councillor in charge of tourism and social cohesion, stated that the project’s initial assessment was positive and that the system would be refreshed in 2025, but she noted that there were still enormous crowds.
“Some weekends had fewer attendees than the same time last year… “But no one expected all of the day trippers to vanish,” he told Reuters.
“It will be more effective in the coming years when we increase the number of days and raise the price,” he said, without specifying how much visitors could have to pay in 2025.
According to a city official, a plan to boost the levy to 10 euros ($10.92) is under consideration for next year.
‘Makes Venice a museum’
According to The Associated Press news agency, roughly 438,000 tourists paid the admission tax over the last two and a half months, earning income of approximately 2.19 million euros ($2.4 million), based on data provided by the city.
People staying in Venice hotels were exempt from the levy because they were already subject to a lodging tax. Exemptions also extended to minors under 14, regional residents, students, labourers, and visitors to relatives.
Officials have stated that the funds will be used for essential services such as garbage collection and upkeep, which are more expensive in a city with canals.
Opponents of the plan advocate for policies encouraging the repopulation of Venice’s historic centre, which has been losing residents to the more convenient mainland for decades, such as limiting short-term rentals.
“Raising the [entry charge] to 10 euros is completely worthless. “It turns Venice into a museum,” Martini explained.
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Many of the posters at Saturday’s demonstration also expressed rising worry over the city’s electronic and video surveillance system, which was implemented in 2020 to monitor cellphone data of visitors to the city and serves as the backbone of the tourism control system. Placards carried cautions against the misuse of personal information and a lack of data protection.
“The access ticket is a great distraction for the media, which only speaks about the 5 euros, which will become 10 euros next year,” said Giovanni Di Vito, a Venice local involved in the anti-tourist tax movement.
“But no one is focusing on the system for surveillance and control of citizens.”
Martini argued for a free booking system for visitor slots to keep lower-income families from being priced out, but one that could track potential tourist arrivals.
“We need to be able to warn people that if they come on certain days, they are not going to have a good time,” he said, adding that the long-term goal should be to entice full-time residents who have drained away from the city in recent years as short-term rentals increasingly dominate the housing market.
