Venice officers on Friday unveiled new guidelines for day-trippers, which come into impact on January 16, 2023.
Vacationers who select to not keep in a single day in accommodations or different lodgings should enroll on-line for the day they plan to come back and pay a payment.
Venice is to pressure day-trippers to make reservations and pay a payment to go to the historic lagoon metropolis, in a bid to raised handle guests who usually far outnumber residents.
These vary from three to 10 euro per particular person, relying on advance reserving and whether or not it’s peak season or the town could be very crowded.
Transgressors danger fines as excessive as 300 euro if stopped and unable to point out proof they booked and paid with a QR Code.
Roughly four-fifths of all vacationers come to Venice only for the day. In 2019, the final full yr of tourism earlier than the pandemic, some 19 million day-trippers visited Venice and offered only a fraction of the income from these staying for no less than one night time.
Venice’s tourism commissioner disregarded any suggestion that the measure would search to restrict the variety of out-of-towners coming to Italy’s most-visited metropolis.
“We received’t speak about quantity cut-offs. We’re speaking about incentives and disincentives,” Simone Venturini instructed a information convention in Venice.
The reservation-and-fee method had been mentioned a couple of years in the past, however was placed on maintain in the course of the pandemic. Covid-19 journey restrictions noticed tourism in Venice almost vanish — and let Venetians have their metropolis virtually to themselves, for the primary time in a long time.
Mass tourism started within the mid-Sixties. Customer numbers saved climbing, whereas the variety of Venetians dwelling within the metropolis steadily dwindled, overwhelmed by congestion, the excessive value of delivering meals and different items in car-less Venice, and frequent flooding that damages properties and companies.
Since friends at accommodations and pensions already pay a lodging tax, they’re exempt from the reserve-and-fee obligation.
With the brand new rule, Venice goals to “discover this steadiness between (Venetian) resident and long-term and short-term” guests, Mr Venturini stated, promising that the brand new system “will probably be easy for guests” to handle.
He billed Venice as the primary metropolis on the earth placing such a system for day-only guests in place.
The tourism official expressed hope that the fee-and-reservation obligation will “scale back frictions between day guests and residents”.
In peak tourism system, vacationers can outnumber residents two to at least one, within the metropolis that measures two sq. miles in space.
