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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

>A large vessel pays up to 30,000 euros a day to dock in the harbor

In situations of overcrowding, it seems the obvious solution is simply to raise taxes and fees, in order to lower the number of tourists. This would raise more revenue from each tourist while cutting maintenance costs which are driven by volume.

Is there some non-obvious reason this isn't done?

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Because lowering the number of tourists means lowering the amount of money coming in for tourist services.

Except that they specifically said "raise more revenue from each tourist" and "while cutting maintenance costs". Both of those seem like they would negate your point.

That's not necessarily true. Like with pricing anything else, the maximum total revenue is at a price that's neither 'too low' or 'too high'. And the residents of Venice seem willing to forego some revenue for less tourists anyways.

Exactly. Artificially reducing the supply of diamonds doesn't reduce profit. It increases it.

One of the problems has been people arriving on these ships and not spending any money locally. Everything they need is provided on the boat.

You missed the point of the piece, which is not about overcrowding at all. How exactly is trying to make even more money from tourism going to halt the problems that this article postulates are from the insane amount of tourist money?

Obviously you can't raise the prices to infinity. There is a certain price/quantity where you optimize your global revenue. That price coincides with the city working at full capacity (ie: getting every possible penny).

But is Venice at such an optimized point? There are currently people who avoid it due to crowding, suggesting ample demand.

They may be able to, say, raise prices 50% and drop traffic only 20%.

An alternative could be to simply ban cruise ships, or limit their size, if the problem is that cruise ships themselves compete with the local economy for food, lodging and entertainment.

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