Venice has ended its pilot program charging a 5-euro ($5.46) entry fee for daytrippers arriving on particularly congested days, after opponents called the experiment a failure.
Authorities at the famous Italian destination, also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, introduced an entry fee in April, hoping it would dissuade some people from visiting. The system is designed to manage the flow of tourists when visitor numbers are at their peak.
But on Saturday, several dozen activists gathered outside Saint Lucia’s train station, overlooking a busy canal, to protest the entry fee, saying it did little to dissuade visitors from arriving on peak days. , as expected.
“The ticket is a failure, as the city’s data shows,” said Giovanni Andrea Martini, a member of the opposition city council.
In the first 11 days of the experimental period, an average of 75 thousand visitors were recorded in the city. Martini said that was 10,000 more per day than on three indicative holidays in 2023, citing figures provided by the city based on cellphone data tracking arrivals to the city.
Simone Venturini, councilor responsible for tourism and social cohesion, said that the initial evaluation of the program was positive and confirmed that the system would be renewed in 2025, but acknowledged that there are still large crowds.
“On some weekends there were fewer people than in the same period last year… but no one expected all the day-trippers to miraculously disappear,” he told the Reuters news agency.
“It will be more effective in the coming years when we increase the number of days and increase the price,” he added, without saying how much visitors might have to pay in 2025.
A proposal to double the fee to 10 euros ($10.92) is being considered for next year, a city spokesperson added.
‘Makes Venice a museum’
In the last two and a half months, almost 438,000 tourists paid the entry tax, generating revenue of around 2.19 million euros ($2.4 million), according to the Associated Press news agency, based on data provided around the city.
The fee was not applied to people staying in hotels in Venice, who already pay a lodging tax. The exemptions also apply to children under 14, residents of the region, students, workers and people visiting relatives, among others.
Officials said the money would be used for essential services, which cost more in a city crossed by canals, including trash removal and maintenance.
Opponents of the plan want policies that encourage the repopulation of Venice’s historic center, which has been losing residents to the more convenient mainland for decades, including imposing limits on short-term rentals.
“Wanting to raise this [entrance fee] at 10 euros, it is absolutely useless. This makes Venice a museum,” said Martini.
Many of the banners at Saturday’s protest also indicated growing concern about the electronic and video surveillance system the city introduced in 2020 to monitor the cellphone data of people arriving in the city, which is the backbone of the city’s control system. tourism. The posters included warnings about the use of personal data and lack of data privacy.
“The access ticket is a big distraction for the media, who only talk about these 5 euros, which will become 10 euros next year,” said Giovanni Di Vito, a Venice resident active in the campaign against the tourist tax.
“But no one is focusing on the citizen surveillance and control system.”
Martini advocated, instead, a free reservation system for visitor places, to prevent low-income families from being undervalued, but that was capable of tracking possible tourist arrivals.
“We need to be able to warn people that if they come on certain days, they’re not going to have a good time,” he said, adding that the long-term goal should be to attract back permanent residents who have burned out. of the city in recent years, as the short term allows it to increasingly dominate the real estate market.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
