Venice announces bookings and fees for mandatory day trips

Venice will force day-trippers to book and pay to visit the historic lagoon city to better manage visitors who often far outnumber residents.

Venice officials on Friday unveiled new rules for day trips that will take effect on January 16, 2023.

Visitors who choose not to stay overnight in a hotel or other accommodation must register and pay the fee online on the day they plan to come.

These range from 3 to 10 euros per person, depending on advance booking and whether it is high season or the city is very crowded.

Violators face fines of up to 300 euros if they are stopped and fail to show evidence that they used the QR code to book and pay.

Venice’s tourism commissioner has dismissed any suggestion that the measure is aimed at limiting the arrival of foreigners to Italy’s most visited city.

“We’re not talking about digital cutoffs. We’re talking about incentives and inhibitions,” Simone Venturini told a news conference in Venice.

The method of booking and charging was discussed years ago, but was put on hold during the pandemic. Covid-19 travel restrictions have all but wiped out Venice’s tourism industry – giving Venetians a city almost of their own for the first time in decades.

Mass tourism began in the mid-1960s. Tourist numbers have climbed while the number of Venetians living in the city has steadily dwindled, overwhelmed by congestion, the high cost of delivering food and other goods in car-free Venice and frequent flooding that destroy homes and businesses.

Since hotel and pension guests have already paid the accommodation tax, they are exempt from the obligation to book and charge.

Under the new rules, Venice aims to “find this balance between (Venetian) residents and long-term and short-term” tourists, Mr Venturini said, promising the new system “will be simple for tourists” to manage.

He called Venice the first city in the world to have such a system for day-only tourists.

The tourism official expressed hope that fees and booking obligations will “reduce friction between day-trippers and residents”.

In a peak tourist system, visitors can outnumber residents 2 to 1 in a city that is 2 square miles in size.

Venice’s permanent population in this historic city is just over 50,000, a fraction of what it was a few generations ago.

Exceptions to the cost of day trips include children under the age of six, people with disabilities and people who own holiday apartments in Venice, as long as they can prove they have paid real estate taxes.

Cruise ships draw crowds of tourists into Venice’s labyrinth of narrow streets, especially around St. Mark’s Square, when they disembark for a few hours’ day trips.

Those tourists also have to pay, unless their cruise line pays Venice a flat fee.