Venice holds off on a tourist tax... for now

The Editors

June 8, 2022

In its latest bid to curb overtourism, Venice is launching a new pre-booking system and an entry fee for travelers. So, will it work?

Venice has announced it will postpone its controversial ‘tourist tax’ until January 2023. But plans are still moving ahead for a new pre-booking system, which is due to roll out this month. So will these measures help get overtourism under control? And what else is being done to save the ‘dying city’?

The proposed entrance fee for Venice has been pushed back again, this time till January 2023, as the lagoon city prepares to welcome a new surge of summer tourists.

The move comes after 160,000 travelers flocked to Venice for Easter weekend, prompting the city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, to announce a two-part scheme to curb overtourism: A daily fee for travelers of up to €10 (now delayed), and a new pre-booking system, which is due to roll out in June 2022.

As Europe opens up again, and Venice inches closer to pre-pandemic visitor numbers, the big question looming over everyone’s head is: Can we make this sustainable?

“Tourism starts again,” Brugnaro tweeted in April. “We will be the first in the world [to introduce] this difficult experiment. Today, many have understood that the booking system is the right path to take for a more balanced management of tourism.”

Venice has a well-documented overtourism problem, and an entrance fee (labeled by some as a ‘tourist tax’) has been in the pipeline since it was approved by the Italian government in 2018. It was postponed amid COVID-19 restrictions, and has now been pushed back again.

Instead, a six-month pilot pre-booking program is about to get underway. The new system will require all visitors to Venice to reserve their spot in advance. It’s a free reservation—for now—and once booked, each traveler will receive a QR code. This code will eventually be scanned at certain high-flow access points to the city, such as Santa Lucia train station and St Mark’s Square.

Local residents would obviously be exempt from this program, although day-trippers from the surrounding Veneto region will still need to register. There are a few other proposed exemptions, too, such as those entering Venice to see relatives, or attend funerals.

“Those who book will receive incentives, such as discounts on entering museums. To determine the access fee, we will set a maximum threshold of 40,000 or 50,000 visitors a day.”

- Simone Venturini, Venice Tourism

“Given the two years of pandemic and suffering [for those in the hospitality industry], we will use the next few months to fine-tune the booking platform,” Venice tourism councillor Simone Venturini told Corriere del Veneto.

“The experimental phase begins in June, when day tourists will be invited to book through a website that is being completed by the council,” Venturini told La Repubblica. “Those who book will receive incentives, such as discounts on entering museums. To determine the access fee, we will set a maximum threshold of 40,000 or 50,000 visitors a day.” That’s approximately one visitor for each permanent resident of Venice. The access fee will be waved, for now, but is due to start in January 2023.

The kinks of this pre-booking system—who needs to apply etc.—are still being ironed out. Travelers staying overnight, for example, will have their reservation automatically placed through their accommodation. And if and when the entry fee kicks in next year, Venturini has clarified that overnight visitors won’t need to pay it, since they’re already being slugged a tourist tax (tassa di soggiorno). Residents, workers and students coming to Venice will have a virtual key to get them through the turnstiles, with the remaining daily cap made up of travelers. If the threshold is reached on a given day, tourists will be turned away.

“There is a physical limitation on the number of people that can be in the city at the same time,” Marco Bettini, director of Venis, the IT company behind the booking system, told Reuters last year. “We don’t want to leave anyone behind or stop people from coming to Venice. We want people to book in advance…in order to provide a better quality of service.”

Entrance fees and tourist taxes have been debated and discussed in Venice for years. The fee was technically green lit by the Italian government in 2018, after Venice recorded a whopping 30 million visitors in a single year. The new scheme is also just one cog in a complex tracking and surveillance machine, designed to slow down galloping tourism, which includes a €3m hi-tech Smart Control Room that monitors foot traffic through the city in real time. Venice also banned cruise ships in 2021, in an effort to control the hordes of day-trippers.

Not everyone’s a fan of the new program, as you might expect. The local Democratic Party delegation has criticised Brugnaro for “immobilism” and failing to take advantage of the pandemic dip to come up with a cohesive tourism strategy. As reported in Italian newspaper La Stampa last year, supporters of the pre-booking system say it will encourage more respect for Venice as a historical landmark, while critics are worried it will turn the city into a floating theme park.

The big question looming over all this, of course, is: Will any of it actually work? 50,000 visitors a day is still over 18 million people per year, and it’s unlikely that a pre-booking system or a €10 entry fee will actually discourage anyone from visiting Venice. With reports last year that the city is losing three permanent residents each day, the next few years will determine whether Venice remains a living breathing city, or an open-air museum with a €10 ticket.

The Editors

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