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Comment by mc_blue | Hacker News Reader

Interesting take! A couple thoughts: -Wouldn't a high tax/price on tourism have a drastic negative effect on the local economy? Your example of Venice - if you price out the majority of tourists, I would think the Venice economy would have to do a major pivot, something that would likely take some time and effort. -High tax/price on tourism is only pricing out the tourists that can't afford the tax. I agree it's one of the easier solutions to implement, but something doesn't feel right about tourist destinations becoming destinations only for those rich enough to afford the tax. In addition, I don't necessarily believe there is a correlation between wealth and environmentally friendly tourist behavior. In other words, are wealthier tourists really that more likely to treat the tourist destination in a more positive way than lower/middle class tourists?

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For me, Venice is too far gone to change without significant pain to the local economy.

The point of pricing isn't to completely eliminate tourism, it's to lower it.

The goal is to find a price point that cuts down, but doesn't eliminate tourism.

And while it would attract a higher wealth tourist, you can easily adjust the system to a lottery type where you have a certain percent of people who just buy access and others who won a lottery.

They do this out west for river access during the summer. They don't want a whole bunch of people river rafting and destroying the river, so they have a lottery that you have to buy a ticket for. You lose the money if you don't win a license. This creates revenue without increasing the number of tourists. And it also creates a system where people who really want to go there, will buy a ticket without a guarantee of a spot. And,when they do go, they tend to be much better quality tourists since.

I know people who have been buying tickets for almost a decade and haven't gotten a spot.

Something like this is very effective at keeping up revenue and decreasing the number of tourists.

That solution could be rephrased as:

“Make poor people poorer”.

The price increases won’t impact the wealthy, even if they did have to reduce their travel by 10-20%. But it will impact those that save (or pay-off) for years for their dream trip or honeymoon trip.

My preferred approach would be more progressive than regressive: just make rich people poorer through income/capital/dividend taxes.

If you are poor, should you really be going to Venice?

A reasonably priced lottery would give middle income people access and an even playing field against wealthy people.

This system, combined with a limit on tourist infrastructure would cut down on excessive visitors and make it sustainable.

Only if you can price a ticket as a fraction of the net worth of people.

I like the lottery idea a lot, as it would create a more level playing field. I think a possible improvement would be to have a small cost of x to enter the lottery, and then if you are selected you pay X to secure your spot where X >> x.

We could observe Iceland at the moment; their budget airline that offered cheap flights from Europe went bust in March. Tourist numbers fell, but apparently high-end hotel/package bookings weren't really affected, just the low-budget hotels.

But yeah, making it something just the elite can enjoy would not be fair..

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