Day-trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism
Authorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.
Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.
But several residents’ committees and associations have planned protests for Thursday, arguing that the fee will do nothing to resolve the issue.
“I can tell you that almost the entire city is against it,” claimed Matteo Secchi, who leads Venessia.com, a residents’ activist group. “You can’t impose an entrance fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. This is a bad image for Venice … I mean, are we joking?”
I find it surprising that it’s unpopular with the residents
My (admittedly naive) understanding was that tourism keeps increasing and there’s no way to build more space, so Venice has become overcrowded and is potentially at risk of sinking?
Sure it’s not great to have to impose a restriction like this, but there aren’t many other ways to reduce the number of people going to a place that they want to go to.
Other than the poor optics of charging entrance as if it’s a theme park, the fee might also embolden some of the more obnoxious tourists in behaving like they would at an ACTUAL theme park rather than how they would as guests in a “real” city, in order to “get their money’s worth”.
Yeah, people definitely have a tendency to act entitled just because they’ve paid money.
It reminds me of this story from Freakonomics:
The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents’ monthly bill, which was roughly $380.
After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went… up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.
Interesting story. $3 is worth it for a few minutes of extra child care.
I wonder if they had charged $1 a minute that the parent was late, if that would have nipped the problem in the bud.
Who said anything about fines? If anything, your example supports my comment 🤷
My guess is that the term “residents” actually refers to greedy business and hotel owners which are the reason this rule is necessary in the first place.
Residents, commuters, students and children under the age of 14 are exempt, as are tourists who stay overnight.
So they are just attempting to bully the worst kind of tourists out which is totally fair.
This article is surely taking a group of people and holding them as being representative of the populace as a whole. In fact, much reporting indicates that locals are sick of tourists and tourists, especially on cruise ships, are actively destroying the environment. Venice has already banned cruise ships from certain parts as a result. I call bullshit on this article.
They should honestly increase the cost to something more akin to a theme park. There isn’t that much value that the city brings in beyond it being a tourist destination.
the obvious solution is to only let in a set number of people per day. This is just a nickel and dime scheme.
The fee is only charged on certain days, I believe a total of 29 days this year, to dissuade people from visiting on those days that are considered to be the busiest.
This isn’t going to dissuade anyone though. No one is going to change their vacation plans for $5.
This is just the city wanting money from tourists directly.
which will further entrench the city gov to cater to tourists if they become dependent on such fees
