Venice ended a pilot program on Sunday that required day-trippers to pay an entrance fee. The country is now more than €2 million ($3.3 million Australian) richer and determined to expand the levy. But opponents have called the experiment a failure.
Several dozen activists gathered outside the Santa Lucia train station overlooking a busy canal on Saturday to protest against the five-euro charge, which they say does little to deter visitors from arriving as planned on peak days.
“The electoral ticket is a failure, as the city’s data shows,” said Giovanni Andrea Martini, an opposition city council member.
During the first 11 days of the test period, the city saw an average of 75,000 visitors, up 10,000 per day from three holidays in 2023, Martini said, citing city figures based on cellphone data that tracks arrivals in the city.
Venice introduced the long-discussed day-tripper tax this year on 29 days, mostly weekends and holidays, from April 25 to mid-July.
In the past two and a half months, more than 247,000 tourists paid the tax, generating revenue of around 2.19 million euros, according to AP calculations based on city data.
Officials said the money would be used for essential services such as garbage collection and maintenance, which cost more in a city crisscrossed by canals.
The tax was not imposed on guests staying in hotels in Venice. They already have to pay an overnight tax. Exceptions also applied to children under 14, residents of the region, students, workers and people visiting relatives.
The city’s top tourism official, Simone Venturini, has indicated that the tax will be maintained and even increased. A proposal to double the fee to 10 euros next year is being considered, a city spokesman said.
Opponents of the plan say it has not made the city more livable as intended, with narrow sidewalks and water taxis remaining overcrowded. They want measures that encourage a repopulation of Venice’s historic center, which has been losing residents to the more convenient mainland for decades, and that also include restrictions on short-term rentals.
There are now more places to stay overnight in the old town than official residents, whose number is at an all-time low of 50,000.
“Raising the price to ten euros is completely pointless. That turns Venice into a museum,” said Martini.
Many of the banners at Saturday’s protest also expressed growing concern about the system of electronic and video surveillance that the city introduced in 2020 to monitor the mobile phone data of people entering the city, which forms the backbone of the system for controlling tourism.
“The entrance ticket is a big distraction for the media, which only talks about these five euros, which will rise to ten euros next year,” says Giovanni Di Vito, a Venice resident who is actively involved in the campaign against the tourist tax.
“But no one pays attention to the system of surveillance and control of citizens.”