Venice to require day-trippers to make reservations

Venice will require day-trippers to make reservations and pay a fee to visit the historic lagoon city in order to manage visitors who often outnumber residents in the historic centre.

If you choose not to stay overnight in hotels or other lodgings, you will have to sign up online for the day you plan to come and pay a fee, ranging from €3 to €10 2.58 to 8.62 a person, depending on advance booking and whether it is peak season or the city is very crowded.

Transgressors can be fined up to €300 if they are stopped and unable to show proof they have paid with a QR code.

Just for the day, nearly four-fifths of tourists come to Venice. In the last full year of tourism before the epidemic, 19 million day trippers visited Venice and provided just a fraction of the revenue from those staying for at least one night.

Venice's tourism commissioner brushed off any suggestion that the measure would limit the number of out-of-towners coming to Italy's most-visited city.

We won't talk about number cutoffs. Simone Venturini spoke about incentives and disincentives at a news conference in Venice.

The reservation- and- fee approach was discussed a few years ago, but was put on hold during the Pandemic. For the first time in decades, Venice's travel restrictions on Covid 19 led to the disappearance of tourism and let Venetians have their city practically to themselves.

Mass tourism began in the mid- 1960s, with visitors numbers kept climbing, while the number of Venetians living in the city steadily dwindled, overwhelmed by congestion, the high cost of delivery of food and other goods in car-less Venice and frequent flooding that damages homes and businesses.

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

Venturini said the new system will be simple for visitors to manage, as Venice aims to find a balance between residents and long-term and short-term visitors.

He billed Venice as the first city in the world to put a system in place for day-only visitors. The tourism official said he hopes that the fee- and- reservation obligation will reduce friction between day visitors and residents. In peak tourism system, tourists can outnumber residents two to one, in a city that measures 5 sq km 2 sq miles in area.

Venice's resident population in the historic city is just over 50,000, a small fraction of what it was a couple of generations ago.

Exceptions to the day-tripper fees include children younger than six, people with disabilities and those who own vacation apartments in Venice, provided they show proof they have paid real estate taxes.

Cruise ships contribute to the hordes of visitors swarming Venice's maze of narrow streets, especially near St Mark's Square, when they disembark day-trippers for a few hours. Those visitors will have to pay unless their cruise liner company pays a set fee to Venice.