Venice day-trippers will have to make reservations and pay fee | Venice

Venice will oblige day-trippers to make reservations and pay a fee to visit the historic lagoon city, in an attempt to better manage visitors who often far outnumber residents in the historic center.

Venice officials on Friday unveiled new rules for day-trippers, which will be in effect from 16 January 2023.

Tourists who choose not to stay overnight in hotels or other lodgings will have to sign up online for the day they 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 risk fines as high as €300 if they are stopped and unable to show proof they booked and paid with a QR code.

About 80% of tourists come to Venice just for the day. In 2019, the last full year of tourism before the pandemic, 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 seek to limit the number of out-of-towners coming to Italy’s most-visited city.

“We won’t talk about number cutoffs. We’re talking about incentives and disincentives,” Simone Venturini told a news conference in Venice.

The reservation-and-fee approach had been discussed a few years ago, but was put on hold during the pandemic. Covid-19 travel restrictions caused tourism in Venice to nearly vanish – and let Venetians have their city practically to themselves, for the first time in decades.

Mass tourism began in the mid-1960s. Visitor numbers kept climbing, while the number of Venetians living in the city steadily dwindled, overwhelmed by congestion, the high cost of delivering 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.

With the new rule, Venice aims to “find this balance between residents and long-term and short-term” visitors, Venturini said, promising the new system would be simple for visitors to manage.

He billed Venice as the first city in the world putting such a system for day-only visitors in place. The tourism official expressed hope that the fee-and-reservation obligation would “reduce frictions between day visitors and residents”. In peak tourism system, tourists can outnumber residents two to one, in the city that measures 5 sq km (2 sq miles) in area.

Venice’s resident population in the historic city numbers 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 can show proof they pay real estate taxes.

Cruise ships contribute to the hordes of visitors to 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, too, unless their cruise liner company pays Venice a set fee.