Day trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism

Day-trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism

Authorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.

Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.

But several residents’ committees and associations have planned protests for Thursday, arguing that the fee will do nothing to resolve the issue.

“I can tell you that almost the entire city is against it,” claimed Matteo Secchi, who leads Venessia.com, a residents’ activist group. “You can’t impose an entrance fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. This is a bad image for Venice … I mean, are we joking?”

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    651·
    6 months ago

    Other than the poor optics of charging entrance as if it’s a theme park, the fee might also embolden some of the more obnoxious tourists in behaving like they would at an ACTUAL theme park rather than how they would as guests in a “real” city, in order to “get their money’s worth”.

    • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
      31·
      6 months ago

      Yeah, people definitely have a tendency to act entitled just because they’ve paid money.

      It reminds me of this story from Freakonomics:

      The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents’ monthly bill, which was roughly $380.

      After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went… up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.