For four months earlier this year, the Italian city of Venice piloted a system of charging extra fees for day trippers. Visitors who were not staying at an overnight accommodation had to pay 5 euros ($5.40) on certain days considered the busiest, including weekends and national holidays.
The fee was trialled as a way to “deter” visitors from arriving on busy days and thus help address the problem of overtourism in Venice.
In 2023, 5.7 million people visited Venice, with peak days seeing more than 80,000 arrivals. To put that in context, the historic center of Venice now has less than 50,000 inhabitants.
However, the experiment did not succeed in reducing the number of visitors to the famous canal city. Instead, during the first 11 days of the trial period, nearly 750,000 visitors were registered. On the same days in 2023, there were about 680,000 posts.
Despite the poor results, Venice authorities have announced that the daily commuter tax will return in 2025, doubling this time to as much as €10 ($10.80) on some days.
Many Venetians opposed the entrance fee from the beginning, and held protests including on the day of its launch. For activists, the solution to Venice’s tourism problems lies in supporting the local community.
Entrance fees to Venice are an ‘invasion of privacy’
Susanna Poloni is an activist with Rete Solidale Casa, which fights for housing rights for Venetians.
She highlights that the entrance fee affected not only tourists who were required to pay, but also those living in the city who did not.
“What reasonable reasons can justify an attack on privacy, after the most beautiful city in the world has been transformed into the only paid city, and its residents are forced to prove that they are citizens of their city?” She says.
“The weight of overtourism has been pressed on the lives of the citizens of Venice.”
‘Urgent’ need to reduce short-term rentals in Venice
Poloni has studied official data from Venice’s smart control room, which collects all sorts of visitor statistics, and highlights another problem she feels the authorities should be addressing instead.
The number of registered overnight visitors is higher than the number of registered beds in the city, leading her to conclude that there are dozens of illegal short-term rentals.
She says there is “an urgent and indispensable need for the city to equip itself with a rental system that significantly reduces short-term rentals in the city.”
Venice authorities need to invest in tourism management
For many activists, it is not only the number of tourists that is ruining Venice, but also the type of tourism.
Valeria Duflot created the visitor advisory website Venezia Autentica in 2015 and is now advocating for a tourism model that benefits locals.
“I think[the day traveler tax]is in no way sufficient to address the main issues caused by tourism today: the displacement of local businesses and local residents,” she says.
“We must all view the demise of Venice, its community and its heritage as a cautionary tale and work collectively to change the way we measure success and engage communities in the tourism industry.”
Duflot would like to see a greater focus on impact and enabling tourists to spend their time and money where it benefits the local community, economy and heritage.
For Boulogne, the €5 entrance fee is not only ineffective, it prevents funding from being directed towards actions to help residents.
“Among other necessary and urgent measures are the renovation and privatization of vacant public housing, economic diversification to create job opportunities that are not the sole channel of tourism, and improving local public transportation and social and health services,” she says.
“Only in this way will it be possible to save the city.”