Venice tightens the tollbooth screw - travelnews.ch

From 2025, day-trippers to Venice will have to pay up to ten euros to enter the city if they don't plan their visit well in advance. Despite the fees, the rush to the city in the lagoon remains high, and mass tourism continues to cause massive problems.

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This year, Venice became the first city in the world to start charging day tourists an entrance fee. The fee, which is set at five euros, will be doubled in the future. Starting in 2025, visitors will have to pay up to ten euros to spend a few hours walking around the city on the Italian Adriatic coast. In addition, the fee will now be charged on a total of 54 days. This year, which was officially still considered a test phase, the fee was only charged on 29 days.

But hardly anyone was deterred. On the contrary, the number of visitors to the city, which is more than a millennium and a half old and is suffering severely from mass tourism, continued to rise. Nevertheless, Mayor Luigi Brugnaro has now announced that the entrance fee will remain in place – as most people had expected. Children under 14 years of age and some other groups are still exempt from the fee.

In principle, everything will continue as before – only that now more and more will have to be paid. Those who book early can still enter the city for five euros. However, from three days before the excursion, visitors will have to pay double in the future.

The city has now selected 54 days in 2025 when it expects particularly high numbers of visitors and will charge an entry fee: the entire period around Easter from 18 April to 4 May, and then every weekend until the end of July, always from Friday to Sunday. The fee must be paid between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.

This year, 485,000 paying tourists were registered, bringing in more than 2.4 million euros. However, the costs for developing and operating the system are far from covered. Overnight guests still do not have to pay an entrance fee, but they do have to pay a visitor's tax. Most of the year, Venice remains free of charge.

The stream of visitors brings a lot of money to the city, but also causes major problems. On many days, it is almost impossible to get through the narrow streets around St Mark's Square and the Rialto Bridge. Some buildings show the toll that tourism takes on them. The income should therefore be used at some point to renovate canals, streets and buildings.

The payment is usually made by getting a QR code via the internet and downloading it onto your mobile phone before you arrive in Venice. Anyone caught without a receipt has to pay a fine of up to 300 euros in theory. However, no one has been fined so far.

(TN)