Many vacationers are accustomed to nightly tourism taxes tacked on to their lodge payments.
However daytime taxes are a brand new ask.
Venice’s metropolis council on Tuesday accepted a long-awaited regulation to tax day guests 5 euros ($5.38) to go to town.
The brand new tax shall be applied over 30 non-consecutive days in 2024, falling on lengthy weekends within the spring and common weekends in the summertime, in keeping with an announcement revealed Tuesday on town’s web site.
Precise dates shall be introduced within the coming weeks, it mentioned.
Who has to pay the price
Generally, the price will apply to all day vacationers over the age of 14.
In a single day vacationers are exempt, although they’re topic to a separate vacationer tax applied in 2011. This tax varies by journey season, lodging kind and placement, in keeping with town’s web site — and is often between 1 and 5 euros per individual per evening, for the primary 5 nights of a keep.
Why is Venice taxing day guests?
The brand new tax is an try and “shield town from mass tourism,” Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s mayor, posted on X, previously often known as Twitter.
“We’ll perform an experiment with nice humility and can strive to not hurt anybody,” he mentioned, in keeping with a translation of the put up.
Venice has toyed with the concept of taxing day guests for years, as one in all a number of measures to curb overtourism within the metropolis — which locals have lengthy blamed for driving up costs and remodeling town right into a souvenir-laden theme park of kinds.
Residents, particularly the estimated 50,000 who dwell within the metropolis’s historic space, are far outnumbered by the some 5.5 million who visited town in 2019 — lots of whom disembark from cruise ships by the 1000’s to take pictures of Venice’s well-known canals and metropolis squares.
So-called “hit and run” vacationers signify practically three out of each 4 guests to Venice, but they contribute lower than 20% to its tourism financial system, in keeping with the Belgium-based information community Euronews.
Will it work?
Based on analysis, taxes and fines alone will not be adequate to deal with overtourism, mentioned Tatyana Tsukanova, a analysis affiliate at EHL Hospitality Enterprise College in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The town of Venice presently fines guests who eat or drink on the bottom, sit on monuments and bridges, or swim in its canals, in keeping with town’s web site.
Tsukanova cited Bhutan, which reopened in 2022 with a $200 day by day vacationer price imposed to draw “excessive worth, low quantity” vacationers. Earlier this summer season, the nation halved the price to spur extra vacationers to go to.
Crowds by the Grand Canal in the course of the Carnival of Venice on Feb. 11, 2023.
Miguel Medina | Afp | Getty Pictures
Whereas Bhutan’s tax could have labored a bit too nicely, Venice’s tax will not be sufficient to disincentivize vacationers who’ve come from afar to see the traditional metropolis.
Kumar Vinnakota, a lawyer in Dallas, Texas, mentioned he would not suppose twice about paying 5 euros to go to Venice.
“Most cities around the globe have vacationer taxes or lodge taxes paid by vacationers anyway,” he mentioned.