ROME — Traveling to Venice? Get ready to pay for the privilege of visiting the city, one of the most beautiful on the planet. Oh, and make sure to reserve your spot.
From January 2023, visitors will have to make reservations through a new digital system and many will have to pay a daily fee – from 3 to 10 euros, depending on how busy Venice is at the time – as part of a plan to better control the masses love tourists who can overwhelm the fragile city.
With the system, city officials know in advance how many visitors to expect on a given day and can deploy staff and services accordingly. Those who reserve early pay a lower rate.
The reservation system and entrance fee are part of a “revolution” when it comes to visiting Venice and its islands, Simone Venturini, the councilor in charge of tourism and economic development, told reporters on Friday. He said it aims to balance “the needs of residents, the needs of tourists sleeping in the city and those of day-trippers, whose rhythms are different.”
Before the pandemic curbed tourism, hordes of day visitors and cruise ship passengers had transformed Venice into a prime example of ‘overtourism’, the narrow streets so crowded that the police established one-way streets on some days. Annual estimates for tourist numbers fluctuate wildly, with some as high as 30 million and others at a more modest 12 million.
In a city of just over 50,000 residents, those numbers were sometimes overwhelming.
Virtually everyone visiting the city will be required to register, but not everyone will have to pay a fee, including children under 6, guests of Venetian residents and visiting relatives of people held in city prisons. The city’s residents, people who work in Venice, students enrolled in city schools, and property owners (as long as they’ve paid their taxes) are among those who don’t need to register or pay at all.
But even those who are exempt will have to prove they have the right to be in the city. Officials said the verification could take place through a QR code that reveals whether someone deserves an exemption.
Tourists who sleep in the city do not pay the daily fee directly because a fee is already attached to their hotel stay.
People are stopped on the street to check whether they have paid or are entitled to an exemption. Ten to fifteen ‘controllers’ will be deployed every day to enforce the rules, says Michele Zuin, the alderman responsible for budget and taxes.
“Of course their attitude will not be that of a police state – they will be cordial and polite,” Mr Zuin said. “But there will be checks, just as there will be penalties for those caught without making the payment.”
Violators face hefty fines ranging from €50 to €300, plus the €10 entrance fee. And if someone is found to have lied – for example, by claiming they visited a resident to evade compensation – they could face criminal penalties said Mr Venturini.
City officials are still fine-tuning some details, such as the daily pricing and the daily limit on the number of people. They hope that higher costs in peak season will encourage people to come at slower times. “But the city of Venice remains open,” said Mr Zuin.
The city’s costs of implementing and operating the system are expected to be significant, so the city does not expect the fees to do much more than recoup the investment. Should anything be left over, it would be used to settle taxes and service charges for residents.
Mr Venturini said the new reservation system complements a monitoring system introduced last year by the Venice City Council to track people via telephone location data, a system some critics have compared to Big Brother.
Mr Venturini claimed that Venice would be the first city in the world to use such a complex monitoring system. Bumps in the road can be expected, he said.
“It would be foolish, ambitious and arrogant to think that everything will work perfectly, at the snap of a finger,” he said. “It won’t,” he added. “It will be a course that can certainly be improved and we will constantly work on that.”