May 20, 2024 – 7:33 pm
A Venice city councilor described the entry fees introduced on April 25 as a failure Forget. Venice is the first major city in the world to charge tourists an entrance fee, with signs at Santa Lucia train station warning tourists that between 08:30 and 16:30 they must pay €5 to enter the beach city.
According to Mayor Luigi Brugnaro, the entrance fee is necessary to protect the World Heritage Site from the effects of overtourism and reduce the number of visitors. The mayor hopes this will make Venice livable again.
But the number of visitors did not decrease
On May 19, for example, the city received 70,000 visitors, while there were 66,000 on April 23 last year, and 65,000 on June 2, 2023, the Italian Republic Day.
Opinions are divided as to whether this was a failure, because we cannot know how many people would have visited the city without the entrance fee. As in the lion joke:
In the desert, a man sits on the sand and keeps clicking. Another person approaches him and asks: “Excuse me, but why is he clicking?” “I keep the lions away with her.” “But there are no lions in the desert!” “Well, how effective is it?”
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, mass tourism was causing serious problems all over the world: in addition to the obvious inconveniences (crowded streets, crowded public transport, formation of party zones), there is also a serious problem of the impact on the environment and local economies, especially in housing markets. . It's no surprise that strict measures are becoming more common – in this article, we examine how Europe's most vulnerable cities are preparing for the 2024 season.
