Venice will now charge all tourists €5 a day to visit the city
Topics: Travel, World News, Money
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: Stefano Mazzola/Awakening/Contributor/ANDREA PATTARO/Contributor
Topics: Travel, World News, Money
Anyone planning on heading off to Venice for a trip will soon have to pay a fee of €5 just to get into the city itself.
There are plenty of places tourists can go in this world, but it's pretty rare for a city to say they'd like to have fewer people making the journey in to spend money.
While tourists can be pretty annoying, and at times blatantly disrespectful when it comes to the places they visit, the Italian city of Venice appears to be putting their foot down and deciding they'd like to have fewer visitors in the future.
Before the coronavirus pandemic rather put the kibosh on the journeys of many millions of travellers, the Italian National Statistics Institute said that Venice was welcoming around 13 million tourists a year.
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While the pandemic brought those numbers down, visits to Venice have seen a resurgence following the lifting of restrictions and the expectation is that the number of tourists will continue to climb.
Many of those who visit Venice only come for the day and the city struggles with over-tourism during peak travel times.
According to the BBC, Venice will attempt to alleviate this problem with a trial of a €5 fee for people who are coming to the city for the day during peak times, with those under the age of 14 exempt.
People will need to reserve their tourist spot ahead of time and pay the fee, otherwise they risk not being allowed into the popular destination.
This trial of the fee will kick in next year, with those staying overnight exempt, in the hopes of encouraging some of the day-trippers to take off-peak days in the calendar and balance out the influx of tourists a bit.
Venice is known as a great European city of romance and culture, but it is not always the picturesque location you've seen on the posters, as those famous canals can suffer from droughts and they leave quite a stink behind.
The BBC also reports that being such a popular destination for tourists is causing problems for those living in Venice itself.
They report that recent studies found more beds in the city being available for tourists than there were for residents.
A PhD student who has lived in Venice for five years told them it was difficult to find a place to live in the city and that lots of students were told to leave their accommodation in May or June so their landlords could offer the space out to tourists.
This is not the first time Venice has floated the idea of charging tourists on a day visit money to get into the city, but now it looks like that day might actually be arriving.