To Deter Day-Trippers, Venice Tested a €5 Entrance Fee. Did Visitors Stay Away?

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To Deter Day-Trippers, Venice Tested a €5 Entrance Fee. Did Visitors Stay Away?

When Venice introduced a five euro entrance fee in April, officials said the aim was to dissuade day-trippers from visiting at peak times, in a bid to ease the pressure on beleaguered residents forced to share the fragile city’s limited space and public resources.

So did the fee work?

“We are convinced that we limited some peaks,” said Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s mayor, who called the experiment a “great success.”

But at a news conference on Friday, city officials conceded that a more thorough analysis of the data was necessary before it could definitively be said that the objective had been realized in this test phase.

City officials had singled out 29 peak dates from April through the middle of this month — mostly national holidays and weekends — when single-day travelers arriving in Venice between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. were required to pay the €5 fee (about $5.50).

Over the course of the *******, the entrance fee was paid 485,000 times, making the city €2.43 million richer, according to statistics presented.

“Much more than we expected,” Mr. Brugnaro said, adding that it had been estimated that the city would collect about €700,000.

But critics promptly called the pilot project a bust.

“They brag that they raised a lot of money with this contribution, but that shows the opposite,” said Giovanni Andrea Martini, an opposition City Council member, referring to day-tripper traffic. “If you made that much, it means you can’t control it.”

“It’s evidence of a ********,” he said.

City officials said on Friday that comparisons of visitor numbers with previous years was difficult, because there was no comparable data. They said a more complete report would be made public in the fall.

Mr. Martini said that city officials had access to comparable cellphone data of people arriving in the city in prior years, and that the available data showed that more people had come to Venice this year on peak days, regardless of the fee.

“They have all the numbers, all of them — they can’t hide,” he said.

Another critic, Franco Migliorini, an architect who researches overtourism, said €5 was too little to “stop anyone.”

“Just about everything in Venice costs more than €5, practically even a coffee,” Mr. Migliorini said.

Venice is one of dozens of cities in Europe, and around the world, grappling with a glut of tourists, and with growing frustrations among locals, that this year led some residents of Barcelona to take to the streets and squirt tourists eating al fresco with water guns.

The wear and tear of mass tourism has been especially felt in Venice, a collection of islands crisscrossed with canals, which is also threatened by climate change and rising seas. Last year, UNESCO, the ******* Nations’ culture agency, recommended that the city be put on the list of its endangered World Heritage Sites, citing mass tourism as a principal concern, though Venice stayed off the “in danger” list after the access fee was approved.

On the 29 days the fee was levied, all visitors had to register online to receive a QR code. Overnight visitors already pay a tourist tax and were exempt, as were other categories including students, workers and residents of the region.

Officials had warned that transgressors faced steep fines, but a city spokesman said on Friday that none had been issued. Critics said that fines could have been challenged in court, so the city tread lightly.

On Friday, Simone Venturini, the city’s top tourism official, said that Venice had spearheaded a “cultural revolution” when it came to dealing with mass tourism. The fee program provided precise visitor numbers that allowed officials to plan ahead, and also allowed city officials to interact with visitors before they came, he said.

So will the program continue?

Only after the data has been further examined will city officials decide whether to increase the number of days in which the fee would be levied next year, or to raise the cost, which could double on some days, said Mr. Brugnaro, the mayor.

Looking at one graph, Mr. Brugnaro said that compared with the first weeks, there was a clear decrease in the number of people who paid an entrance fee on peak days during the final days it was in effect. “That means something is there,” he said.

Mr. Martini disagreed. “All it means is that there were fewer people paying the fee, because they knew no one was being fined,” he said.

While the mayor judged the test a success and thanked city officials for working hard to ensure that the experimental phase went smoothly, he said, “Right now I don’t feel much like celebrating.”

This past week, Mr. Brugnaro was placed under investigation, and Renato Boraso, a Venice city councilor, was arrested on charges relating to a real estate deal. Mr. Brugnaro said his “conscience was clean, squeaky clean,” and expressed confidence that prosecutors would clear his name.

Opposition lawmakers have called for the entire city administration to resign, and Mr. Martini said that if the city government fell, the entrance fee was unlikely to be reinstated.

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