Venice day-trippers will have to make reservations and pay fee

theguardian.com:

Venice will oblige day-trippers to make reservations and pay a fee to visit the historic lagoon city, in an attempt to better manage visitors who often far outnumber residents in the historic centre.

Venice officials on Friday unveiled new rules for day-trippers, which will be in effect from 16 January 2023.

Tourists who choose not to stay overnight in hotels or other lodgings will have to sign up online for the day they plan to come and pay a fee, ranging from €3 to €10 (£2.58 to £8.62) a person, depending on advance booking and whether it is peak season or the city is very crowded.

Transgressors risk fines as high as €300 if they are stopped and unable to show proof they booked and paid with a QR code.

About 80% of tourists come to Venice just for the day. In 2019, the last full year of tourism before the pandemic, 19 million day-trippers visited Venice and provided just a fraction of the revenue from those staying for at least one night.

Venice’s tourism commissioner brushed off any suggestion that the measure would seek to limit the number of out-of-towners coming to Italy’s most-visited city.

“We won’t talk about number cutoffs. We’re talking about incentives and disincentives,” Simone Venturini told a news conference in Venice.

The reservation-and-fee approach had been discussed a few years ago, but was put on hold during the pandemic. Covid-19 travel restrictions caused tourism in Venice to nearly vanish – and let Venetians have their city practically to themselves, for the first time in decades.

Mass tourism began in the mid-1960s. Visitor numbers kept climbing, while the number of Venetians living in the city steadily dwindled, overwhelmed by congestion, the high cost of delivering food and other goods in car-less