Venice officials on Friday unveiled new rules for day-trippers, which take effect on January 16, 2023.
Tourists who choose not to stay overnight in hotels or other accommodations must register online for the day they plan to come and pay a fee. These range from €3 to €10 ($3.15 to $10.50) per person, depending on whether you book in advance and if it’s peak season or the city is crowded.
Violators risk fines of up to 300 euros ($315) if they are stopped and cannot prove they booked and paid with a QR code.
About four-fifths of all tourists come to Venice just for the day. In 2019, the last full year of tourism before the pandemic, about 19 million day-trippers visited Venice and provided only a fraction of the revenue of those who stayed at least one night.
Venice’s tourism commissioner rejected any suggestion that the measure would seek to limit the number of foreigners coming to Italy’s most visited city.
“We will not talk about number cuts. We are talking about incentives and disincentives,” Simone Venturini told a press conference in Venice.
The booking and billing approach was discussed a few years ago, but was put on hold during the pandemic. Travel restrictions due to COVID-19 have driven tourism to Venice to almost disappear – and left Venetians with their city virtually to themselves for the first time in decades.
Mass tourism began in the mid-1960s. The number of visitors continued to rise, while the number of Venetians living in the city steadily declined, overwhelmed by congestion, the high cost of delivering food and other goods in Venice without cars and frequent floods that damage homes and businesses.
Since guests in hotels and guesthouses already pay accommodation tax, they are exempt from the obligation to book and charge.
With the new rule, Venice aims to “find that balance between (Venetian) residents and long-term and short-term visitors,” Venturini said, promising that the new system “will be simple for visitors” to manage. He described Venice as the first city in the world to implement such a system for day visitors.
The tourism official hoped the fee and reservation requirement would “reduce friction between day visitors and residents”. In the peak tourism system, tourists can outnumber residents 2 to 1 in the 5 square kilometer (2 sq mi) city.
Venice’s permanent population in the historic city numbers just over 50,000, a small fraction of what it was a few generations ago.
Exemptions from day trip fees include children under 6, people with disabilities and those who own holiday apartments in Venice, provided they can prove they pay property taxes.
Cruise ships contribute to the hordes of visitors that flood Venice’s maze of narrow streets, especially near St. Mark’s Square, when they disembark day trippers for a few hours. These guests will also have to pay unless their cruise company pays them a set fee in Venice.
