To deter day-trippers, Venice tested a 5 euro entrance fee. Did visitors stay away?

When Venice introduced a 5 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 Italian 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 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 euro fee (about $5.50).

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

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

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 failure,” he said.

City officials said 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.

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.

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

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

Venice is one of dozens of cities in Europe, and around the world, grappling with a glut of tourists, and growing frustrations among locals this year led some residents of Barcelona, Spain, 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 United 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.

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 Brugnaro, the mayor.

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