Venice prepares to charge tourists, require booking | Hacker News Reader

Venice prepares to charge tourists, require booking

reuters.com

9 pointsbruceb8 comments

About time!

Tourists are the biggest threat to Venice survival, especially, sorry for saying it out loud, Americans.

The city needs to rebalance its population: workers and citizens need more space to live, the city needs to be less crowded to function and be maintained.

Venice is a very fragile ecosystem, it's not a theme park.

I'm from Rome and think that Rome should do the same thing.

Not because we don't like tourists, but because the city is a living organism and priority should go to people living and working there.

Another big issue is businesses over-relying on tourism which almost brought many historical cities on their knees during the pandemic.

Restricting the access to a well known maximum number of tourists has the benefit of reshaping the economy of the city, making it more liveable for the residents.

In Rome, for example, the pandemic brought back roman citizens to live in the city centre that due to airbnb and the over abundance of short term rentals was off limits up to 18 months ago for the city dwellers.

Despite spending less money on average than tourists, after a year and half local businesses are appreciating the change: less problems, less noise, no linguistic barriers, regular customers are the majority now with all the benefits of establishing long term relationships.

I think we need to do that more, in general, everywhere.

Mass tourism is a plague.

You bring up a very important point: AirBnB.

I loved AirBnB when I was traveling myself, but it really is snatching apartments away from regular citizens and driving prices up to a crazy level. And that means as a tourist you travel to a fake ghost town, because all the locals have been priced out of their neighborhood.

Umm. The last time I was in Venice, there were what sounded like Britons partying under the windows late at night. And the first time I was in Venice, I read that the city's population was a third of what it had been in 1970, and there were not a lot of signs of life at night.

Venice used to have a very active (and attractive) night life, but not anymore. The root cause is that young people leave very early due to lack of jobs outside of the tourism sector, increased price of living and worsening quality of life.

Venice population peeked in the 70s with around 350.000 residents, it is now back at the same level of the 30s at around 250.000 residents.

Up until 2019 ~5.5 million tourists visit Venice every year, which is a gigantic number for such a small city.

Last year due to the pandemic it dropped to around 1.3 million.

Exceptional high sea levels did the rest.

I've mentioned the Americans in my first comment because with 5 direct weekly flights from NY, they are the major customers of the large cruise ships that cause so much troubles to the locals.

We should never forget that technically Venice is a sinking city.

I know that's not a popular opinion, but this is long overdue.

Venice used to be known for being spacious and peaceful when I was young. The first time I went there on a school trip, locals were happy to share their stories and talk to us. They sold weird masks which were horrendously expensive because it took weeks of manual work to make one.

The last time I considered going there, they had a government warning stating that they'll be deploying military to keep day tourists out. They also blocked cruise chips from stopping there. Also, the local economy was utterly destroyed by shops selling chinese-made $1 plastic replicas of the masks that the region was once famous for.

Nowadays, Venice is overcrowded, stressful, even claustrophobic. And they have a problem with trash everywhere and tourists peeing everywhere. And all the locals hate it, obviously.

So now that we've established that way too many tourists for a small city can be horrible, I believe it is easy to argue that they should limit the number of tourists.

Most cruise ship operators are of questionable morality (working conditions, environmental pollution) so in the end they might not have much choice to keep random unregistered visitors out than to either build walls or use video surveillance.

Hm, the only thing that's really new is the how.

Every major city of touristic interest finds some way to charge tourists - be it an extra fee for every overnight stay that goes directly to the city (not the hotel) or coach parking etc. etc.

Venice only seems to suffer from the fact that the guests don't have to stay more than a day nor go into any buildings.

"Using 468 CCTV cameras, optical sensors and a mobile phone-tracing system, they can tell residents from visitors, Italians from foreigners, where people are coming from, where they are heading and how fast they are moving."

Turn off your phone in when in Venice?

1984 becomes closer to reality every day.

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