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After ~9 years in California, I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy (Venezia) in late 2020. (I am originally from Italy). Venice is an amazing city, and

• Jistern 4y ago
  >> Entry tickets, if handled properly, could be a great way to fix the issue. I disagree. This seems like a "great way" to damage the tourism industry in Venice. In other words, I think this is a terrible way to deal with tourists who are visiting Venice, yet aren't spending enough money in Venice. I think it would be better to require every adult tourist to buy, say, €10 worth of "Venice Money" which they could spend at any restaurant or shop in Venice during the day they are visiting. Too many tourists? Then increase it to, say, €15. Too few tourists? Then decrease it to, say, €5. Part of the goal is to require tourists to spend a minimum amount of money while visiting Venice. Charging an admission fee seems too heavy-handed. Sure, I realize that my suggestion is tantamount to an admission fee, but it's likely to be more palatable to tourists. The goal isn't merely to get tourists to spend a sufficient amount of money in Venice; part of the goal is to make tourists happy to do so. Tourists are notoriously fickle. Furthermore, they have myriad places in and around Italy, Europe, and, well, the world where they can spend their money. The current problem of too many tourists could very quickly turn into a problem of a dearth of tourists. "Killing the goose that lays the golden egg" would obviously be foolish. I presume the economy in Venice benefits immensely from tourism. This is precisely the sort of measure that people tend to look back at in hindsight and exclaim, "How could we have committed such a blunder! What were we thinking?!?" Having opined all of that, sure, I can see why denizens of Venice would welcome a measure that would decrease the number of tourists generally, and particularly the number of skinflint tourists who visit Venice, yet don't spend a single euro in Venice. Also, frankly, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Venice to enforce dress codes and behavior codes. For example, nobody wants an endless "parade" of motley dressed drunkards wandering around their neighborhood. Personally I happily shop at Costco, but haven’t set foot in a Walmart in perhaps 20 years. I detest Walmart. Why? Part of the reason is this: Costco has a “greeter” standing at the enterance. Ostensibly the greeter’s job is to verify that people entering are members. In fact, that greeter is also eyeballing each person who enters and is empowered to deny enterance to people who don’t meet Costco’s minimum standards (which aren’t very high, but are still much, much higher than Walmart’s standards). Similarly, one of the "secrets" to the success of Las Vegas strip is this: although they allow a lot of rowdy behavior, frankly, they actually keep a tight lid on things: a very, very, tight lid, which I presume you would have noticed if you’ve ever actually been there and paid attention. It's a delicate balance which requires discretion bordering on sophisticated and subtle diplomacy. For example, when dealing with "drunk idiots" the Las Vegas police tend to use kid gloves as much as possible. Why? The powers that be in Las Vegas want "visitors" (tourists) to tell their family, friends, and associates they had a great time on the Las Vegas strip. They also want most of the tourists themselves to return over, and over, and over again. The same is true for a myriad of tourist destinations around the world.
  • nicoburns 4y ago
    The problem isn't primarily "tourists who are not spending enough". It's too many tourists in general to the point that the city infrastructure can't actually support that many people and is overcrowded making it horrible for anyone who is trying to actually live there.
    • wikfwikf 4y ago
      Another point is that overcrowding also makes it less pleasant for the tourists themselves. If you charge people €10 and they find it more pleasant, don't have to queue for drinks or to take selfies, and can get help if they need it, they might consider it well worth it.
    • wizofaus 4y ago
      I wonder what percentage of tourists that visit Venice would see it as "bucket list" or "once in a lifetime" type opportunity to the point that even a €500 entry ticket wouldn't make a noticeable dint in numbers. A lottery system seems a better (and fairer) bet, and those that miss out would just have to try their luck finding accommodation (which actually wasn't that hard when we tried 11 years ago, and personally I don't believe you can meaningfully take in a city like Venice in a single day - or even two for that matter).
      • eesmith 4y ago
        It costs $200 per day (low season) and $250 per day (high season) to visit Bhutan (https://www.tourism.gov.bt/plan/faq https://www.tourism.gov.bt/plan/faq ), bringing in over $120M per year (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BTN/bhutan/tourism-statistics https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BTN/bhutan/tourism-sta... ) from about 250,000 tourists (https://thebhutanese.bt/tourist-arrival-increased-by-13-till-september-2019/ https://thebhutanese.bt/tourist-arrival-increased-by-13-till... ). The fee includes room and board. I'll suspect more people have Venice on their bucket list than Bhutan, so that would be a minimum bound answer for your question.
  • CaptArmchair 4y ago
• GorillaWarfare 4y ago
  This all sounds very sensible. NPR’s Planet Money podcast went into some detail about the economics of fair allocation for the New York Marathon - they reference the solutions you mentioned and a few more as well! https://www.npr.org/2020/01/03/793488868/episode-962-advanced-fairness-at-the-marathon?t=1657177050625 https://www.npr.org/2020/01/03/793488868/episode-962-advance...
  • simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    Super interesting! Thanks for sharing it.
• t0mas88 4y ago
  The parking thing could be done just like London does, charge everyone that enters the center by car a fixed (high) fee per day except for taxi's.
  • pawsforthought 4y ago
    I don’t think you can drive into Venice, it being a city built on a flooded lagoon.
    • didsomeonesay 4y ago
      You can, there is a small part accessible by cars via bridge which is basically only expensive parking and bus terminals. And that implements GP's suggestion, but it turns out this is not enough to limit the number of daytime visitors.
• boredemployee 4y ago
  Venice is a great place. It's sad what is going on. I just wish I could go back there one day.
• danielfoster 4y ago
  My understanding is that there is no entry fee for overnight visitors because this is covered in the overnight hotel tax.
  • Thervicarl 4y ago
    > The cost of tickets will vary from €3 to €10 depending on the season. So there will barely be an entry fee for people coming for the day too. For a measure targeting people coming from thousands of kilometers away, I do not see how this is even going to make a dent in the tourist influx. Looking for relatively similar cases like Machu Picchu or Tanzania national parks, I would have expected a fee between 50$ and 100$ to curb the tourism.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • mulmen 4y ago
    • FalconSensei 4y ago
      But if there are no more tickets to be sold because it's already full, then more people won't be able to get in, right?
• carlob 4y ago
  I don't think the parking is gonna make much of a difference, as you can just park on the mainland and take one of the very frequent, cheap, and quick trains over the bridge.
  • wikfwikf 4y ago
    But if you take a train you are susceptible to being taxed for entry to Venice, since they can just add some fee to the train fare, to either pay for maintenance of the city or simply to reduce numbers.
    • carlob 4y ago
      Kinda like a toll booth would make you susceptible to the same thing on the bridge. The problem with both of those schemes is that there are a number of exceptions: people who live in the region, people who spend the night in the city... You don't want to place the burden of checking your hotel reservation on a train employee during a 5 minute ride or at a toll booth.
• DocTomoe 4y ago
  Or instead of raising bureaucracy and locking out people (not everyone has a smartphone), you could do the more sensible approach and just make things more expensive overall until less people come.
  • lefrenchy 4y ago
    How is that not locking people out also? It’s the same concept applied with a different metric. Not to mention raising prices broadly hurts locals and not just visitors? Entry fees are a pretty simple solution, I hardly imagine it being bureaucratic.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    Tourism always was for the rich until the 1970's. That's when travel became so cheap that everybody started doing it.
    • DocTomoe 4y ago
      .. incidentally just around that time tourism became a problem, especially in places like Venice.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        I don't think that's coincidence. Cheap air travel opened a window on the world and absolutely ruined a lot of places. To the point that if you haven't visited Machu Picchu the consensus is that you haven't really lived. Tourists are roaches, they bring some much needed income to some places but they utterly ruin others, crowd out the locals, cause living spaces to be converted into hotels and make it impossible to buy food and drink at normal prices for the people that live there.
        • eftychis 4y ago
          And also provide a considerable to major contribution to the GDP of affected countries. We like it or not it is an export.
• sleepyhead 4y ago
  I was lucky to visit Venice during the pandemic with few tourists around. But introverted me even sensed the crowd problem then, it must be hell during peak tourist season. But Venice is spectacular. Even a $100 entry would not stop most tourists. There would have to be a hard cap on how many people can visit and cruise ships and such should be discouraged.
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    "The fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin was so worried by accumulative erosion cause by over ten billion visiting tourists per year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt." - HHGTTG Living in a tourist destination is a mixed experience. On the one hand you have a beautiful city to enjoy. On the other hand you can't really enjoy it for 6 to 9 months of the year because your neighbourhood is over-run. At a conference in Rome I met a Venetian who told me those cruise ships are the bane of their lives. She wanted to move out for health reasons, because the constant stinking miasma of marine diesel from dozens of ships. They are also HUGE, like floating cities, that literally darken the skyline. The tens of thousands of visitors dropping litter and blocking the pavement to take selfies are just a minor inconvenience.
    • MomoXenosaga 4y ago
      Tourism saved Venice. Their glory days ended in the 18th century. Also funny we never hear from the people who are making money from tourism? Only negative Nancy's.
      • herbst 4y ago
        If you visit Venice and take a few tours and/or speak to locals you'll hear a lot more about how important tourism is. But there is a lot of thought put on the 'kind' of tourism they want and get.
• dxdm 4y ago
  I wonder if a 50 EUR entry price will really deter many visitors. Venice itself is a huge attraction, people travel there specifically at a significant cost in time and money. That 50 Euro sounds like a drop in the bucket to me, it will simply be priced into the whole cost, just like millions of people happily pay expensive entrance fees for other global attractions like certain amusement parks.
  • ShowalkKama 4y ago
    I've visited venice twice last year and I wouldn't pay 50€... (I do live close so I only have to pay ~20€ for a train ticket)
    • goosedragons 4y ago
      I imagine if you're paying $1000 for a flight there + $$$ for hotels the 50 euros is a drop in the bucket...
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • egeozcan 4y ago
        It's not a drop in the bucket if you are living somewhere close, is the point, if I understood correctly.
  • CalRobert 4y ago
    When I was a broke guy in my mid-20's backpacking around Europe €50 was most of a day's budget. Inflation would change that but all the same it'd be enough to make me just spend more time in Florence. But maybe that's the point; I wasn't doing much for the local economy.
    • jaclaz 4y ago
      Well, JFYI, the mayor of Florence is all over newspapers here in Italy because seemingly Venice could introduce this "access ticket" whilst his own similar proposal (for Florence) last year has not been approved. As someone noticed earlier the introduction of a ticket to access a city (be it Venice or Florence) will probably only make a dent in the total amount of people visiting it (which is the actual problem, they are simply too many) while making a difference between the "wealthy" and the "poor". If the issue is too many people, the only solution is to limit the number of people (within reason and using some common sense in the way these hypothetical limits are set and enforced), introducing a ticket won't make any difference if not - possibly - provide the municipalities with money to cover the expenses these tourists create (the first thing that comes to my mind is litter, but there is also water, street and bridges maintenance, etc.).
• sneak 4y ago
  Do or do not EU citizens have freedom of movement within the EU as a fundamental right?
  • niemandhier 4y ago
    No, it is called ```Freedom of movement for workers in the European Union```. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_for_workers_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_for_worker...
  • notahacker 4y ago
    That allows Europeans to migrate to other EU countries to work without requiring visas. It doesn't give them free entry into tourist attractions.
  • samatman 4y ago
    I believe this wouldn't matter. The right to charge toll is well-established, this has always included docking fees, and Venice is an island. They can also regulate the amount of traffic, that's included in the sovereign rights associated with docks. This means they can both charge entry, and limit access in a given day. I expect flatly refusing entry to specific people would be a different story.
• cinntaile 4y ago
  OT but why did you move back?
• dotancohen 4y ago
  So you are suggesting to allocate tourist access to the city primarily to the wealthy, especially on the most desirable days such as weekends and holidays? The poor can visit on less desirable days? I don't disagree with that, but we should be clear that this is what is being proposed.
  • frosted-flakes 4y ago
    That's what advance purchase tickets are for. "Think of the poor people!" is not always warranted. Visiting Venice as a tourist is a luxury. Do you think poor people should also be able to park their cars in Manhattan for free?
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Maybe these fees should be set by net income or net wealth... Be poor and pay less, be rich and pay factor of 10 to 10000 more...
      • prometheus76 4y ago
        So then rich people will pay poor people to buy the tickets for them. And that's if you can come up with a way for someone to declare their wealth reliably.
      • system16 4y ago
        Even ignoring all the overhead that would bring, it's not feasible for a local municipality to do background checks on the net income or wealth of foreign visitors in any way that would be reliable. It would be trivial to bypass this with fake statements.
      • xeromal 4y ago
        The burden of oversight for determining income would probably wash out any gains made from taxing higher income people.
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
• spaetzleesser 4y ago
  It's a tricky situation. They definitely need entry tickets. You could raise prices until only very rich people can visit. This would probably also produce a lot of income. Or you can handle things with a lottery so everybody can give it a try. There is probably less money in that but it seems more fair.
• snarf21 4y ago
  It seems like you can handle this simpler by just adding a parking tax and a disembark tax. There is already taxes attached to the hotel stay.
  • meowtimemania 4y ago
    They also need a way to limit number of visitors
• stainablesteel 4y ago
  I think Acadia is in a similar situation.