Many vacationers are accustomed to nightly tourism taxes tacked on to their resort payments.
But daytime taxes are a new ask.
Venice’s metropolis council on Tuesday permitted a long-awaited regulation to tax day guests 5 euros ($5.38) to go to the metropolis.
The new tax will likely be applied over 30 non-consecutive days in 2024, falling on lengthy weekends in the spring and common weekends in the summer season, in keeping with an announcement printed Tuesday on the metropolis’s web site.
Exact dates will likely be introduced in the coming weeks, it stated.
Who has to pay the charge
In common, the charge will apply to all day vacationers over the age of 14.
Overnight vacationers are exempt, although they’re topic to a separate vacationer tax applied in 2011. This tax varies by journey season, lodging sort and placement, in keeping with the metropolis’s web site — and is often between 1 and 5 euros per individual per night time, for the first 5 nights of a keep.
Why is Venice taxing day guests?
The new tax is an try to “defend the metropolis from mass tourism,” Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s mayor, posted on X, previously often called Twitter.
“We will perform an experiment with nice humility and can attempt to not hurt anybody,” he stated, in keeping with a translation of the publish.
Venice has toyed with the concept of taxing day guests for years, as certainly one of a number of measures to curb overtourism in the metropolis — which locals have lengthy blamed for driving up prices and reworking the metropolis into a souvenir-laden theme park of kinds.
Residents, particularly the estimated 50,000 who stay in the metropolis’s historic space, are far outnumbered by the some 5.5 million who visited the metropolis in 2019 — lots of whom disembark from cruise ships by the hundreds to take pictures of Venice’s well-known canals and metropolis squares.
So-called “hit and run” tourists represent nearly three out of every four visitors to Venice, but they contribute lower than 20% to its tourism economic system, in keeping with the Belgium-based information community Euronews.
Will it work?
According to analysis, taxes and fines alone will not be enough to deal with overtourism, stated Tatyana Tsukanova, a analysis affiliate at EHL Hospitality Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The metropolis of Venice at the moment fines guests who eat or drink on the floor, sit on monuments and bridges, or swim in its canals, in keeping with the metropolis’s web site.
Tsukanova cited Bhutan, which reopened in 2022 with a $200 daily tourist fee imposed to draw “excessive worth, low quantity” vacationers. Earlier this summer season, the nation halved the charge to spur extra vacationers to go to.
Crowds by the Grand Canal throughout the Carnival of Venice on Feb. 11, 2023.
Miguel Medina | Afp | Getty Images
While Bhutan’s tax might have labored a little too effectively, Venice’s tax will not be sufficient to disincentivize vacationers who’ve come from afar to see the historical metropolis.
Kumar Vinnakota, a lawyer in Dallas, Texas, stated he would not suppose twice about paying 5 euros to go to Venice.
“Most cities round the world have vacationer taxes or resort taxes paid by vacationers anyway,” he stated.