Day trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism

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?”

  • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
    341·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      651·
      7 months ago

      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”.

      • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
        31·
        7 months ago

        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.

    • athos77@kbin.social
      16·
      7 months ago

      Thing is, €5 isn’t all that much. I’m not sure who this is going to deter other than shoestring backpackers and people who fly RyanAir. I’d fully expect that price to increase in the future.

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      121·
      7 months ago

      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.

    • Visstix@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      Yeah it reads like they do want less tourists but don’t agree with the way they are handling it. Maybe a pride thing, with the theme park comment.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      I suspect it’s more unpopular with souvenir shop owners than anyone else.

    • Siegfried@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Maybe the inland residents the ones that are protesting… what we call Venice doesent look to have a lot of residents apart from some particular places