Welcome to Venice! That’ll be €10
From January
2023, day-trippers will have to pay to enter the city.
The money raised from the scheme will be spent on
reducing the garbage collection bills paid by Venetians |
BY HANNAH ROBERTS
July 1,
2022 6:15 pm
https://www.politico.eu/article/welcome-to-venice-italy-10-euros-entrance-fee-tourists/
ROME — Venice is to become the first city in
the world to charge visitors an entrance fee.
To help manage overcrowding and discourage
day-trippers, city authorities announced Friday that they will charge tourists
up to €10, starting in January 2023.
The city has been massively overcrowded for
years, with tourists generating mountains of refuse and bringing the city’s
narrow walkways to a virtual standstill in busy periods.
Once the charges come in, visitors will need
to make an advance online booking and pay between €3 and €10, depending on the
time of year. Inspectors will patrol the city and have the power to stop
tourists and demand to see proof of payment. Failure to have paid online will
be punishable with a fine of up to €300.
The money raised from the scheme will be spent
on reducing the garbage collection bills paid by Venetians, which are higher
than those in neighboring cities.
Residents, and people coming to visit them,
and tourists with an overnight booking in a hotel will be exempt and can
download a certificate to prove they don’t have to pay.
Other cities affected by mass tourism will be
watching closely to see if Venice’s pioneering model works.
Simone Venturini, the city’s tourism chief,
told a press conference Friday that the measure was “truly revolutionary” but
warned it might take time and adjustments to get the system working perfectly.
He said: “It’s a journey, we know that being
the first city in the world to do this, we would be arrogant to think that it
will all work perfectly. We are not saying we have resolved all problems of
over-tourism, or that we have the magic solution. We will constantly improve
it.”
Michele Zuin, the city’s budget chief, said
the fee was about disincentivizing visitors at busy times to create better
flows of tourism. “The city remains open. Venice is not closed,” he said.
“Overbooked:
The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism”
REVIEW:
100 Places to Visit Before They Die
By Joshua
Hammer
April 19,
2013
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/books/review/overbooked-by-elizabeth-becker.html
In 1980,
armed with a backpack and a dog-eared copy of the Lonely Planet guidebook, I
set out on a yearlong post-university trip through Asia. I hired a fishing boat
to take me to a near-deserted island in the Gulf of Thailand and trekked for
weeks through roadless villages in the Nepalese Himalayas. The highlight of the
trip was a one-week tour of Myanmar, then almost completely cut off from the
outside world. Three decades later, Jet Skiers and beach resorts have taken
over my Thai island, and busloads of day-trippers flock to those Nepalese
villages on a newly built trans-Himalayan highway. Even once-hermetic Myanmar
is grabbing a piece of the global tourism trade; during the high season, the
medieval temples of Bagan now face a crush of foreign invaders.
As
Elizabeth Becker observes in “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and
Tourism,” her meticulously reported and often disturbing exposé of the travel
industry, the world has gotten smaller — but not often for the better. A former
correspondent for The New York Times, Becker crisscrossed the globe, from the
beaches of Sri Lanka to the game reserves of sub-Saharan Africa, from the
vineyards of France to America’s national parks, measuring the impact of the
tourist trade. And while she finds plenty of inspiring examples of wise
governance and corporate responsibility, in many other cases greed and
shortsightedness have ruined once-pristine environments, exacerbated human
misery and destroyed the spontaneity that once made travel an adventure.
As Becker
tells it, entrepreneurism, technology and political transformation all brought
about the tourism boom. In the late 1950s, Arthur Frommer, a former G.I.,
turned a guidebook he wrote for soldiers on R.&R. into the best-selling
“Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.” It made overseas travel inviting for millions. The
decreasing cost of long-distance flights placed exotic destinations within the
reach of people who once would have indulged their wanderlust by reading
National Geographic. And the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet
Union opened regions that had previously been off limits. Before 1990, Becker
reports, 60 percent of the world’s international tourists visited Western
European countries. “Afterward the tourist map was redrawn” to include the
former Eastern bloc and “vast swaths of Africa and Asia.” The result, she says,
was a remarkable surge in the overall number of foreign trips, from 25 million
in 1960 to one billion in 2012. Today, “in gross economic power,” tourism “is
in the same company as oil, energy, finance and agriculture.”
In the face
of the tourist onslaught, some governments have acted with foresight and
sensitivity. Becker lavishes praise on France, which has protected its coasts
and its cottage industries, including winemaking and cheese production, through
a mix of subsidies and tough environmental laws. Costa Rica has become the
world’s pioneer of “ecotourism,” turning cloud forests into nature reserves and
inspiring hotels to go green. The Costa Rican government even refused to sign a
free-trade pact that would have forced it to admit developers from the United
States and jeopardized control of its coastline. Looking for a safari, Becker
avoids Kenya and South Africa, which have increasingly become “Out of Africa”
theme parks. Instead she heads to Zambia, where the safari industry is just
beginning to be built up. Here she finds conservationists, government officials
and tour operators seeking a balance between encouraging tourism and
safeguarding the country’s wildlife. “Zambia is still wide open,” she observes,
“with more than a hint of the Africa that the Europeans fell in love with a
century ago.”
At the
opposite end of the spectrum is Cambodia, which has pursued tourist dollars
with little concern for the environmental or human consequences. The temples of
Angkor Wat are being degraded, and the mystical ambience, Becker writes, has
been lost “in a scrum of foreigners with guides shouting in competing
languages.” Fueled by government corruption, sex tourism has flourished in
Phnom Penh and other Asian cities. Dubai, transformed by oil wealth into an
oasis of conspicuous consumerism, condemns its laborers to the equivalent of
indentured servitude and expends enormous amounts of energy air-conditioning
its skyscrapers, hotels and shopping malls. Dubai and Abu Dhabi, in Becker’s
view, “are now global cities with little left of their desert heritage, their
environment or their hold on the future should all those foreigners leave.”
She devotes
two chapters to China, the new colossus in the tourism industry, where Becker
and her husband stay in ersatz-traditional hotels, endure shakedowns in a panda
park and are led around by a robotic guide who insists that the smog stinging
their eyes and making them choke is merely a “yellow mist.” The guide also
tells them that if the government hadn’t mowed down pro-democracy demonstrators
at Tiananmen Square “China would have collapsed.”
Becker aims
her sharpest barbs at the cruise ship industry, which claims to add some $40
billion a year to the United States economy. Giants like Royal Caribbean and
Carnival Cruise Lines avoid paying minimum wage and exempt themselves from
environmental scrutiny by registering their vessels under the flags of
countries with lax or nonexistent regulations. They lure cruise passengers into
making expensive purchases of diamonds and art from companies that offer
dubious money-back guarantees. And they have turned certain ports of call into
crowded bazaars filled with tacky merchandise and tourist hordes. “They’re like
portable low-rent Hiltons,” one walking-tour executive tells Becker, “that go
everywhere with little concern for the garbage they leave behind or the havoc
they make in the short time they invade a place.”
Becker
lapses occasionally into trade-magazine speak, attending “dazzling” industry
awards ceremonies and dutifully quoting hotel and public-relations executives.
I would like to have seen her address the rapid opening of Myanmar, and how its
government is dealing with a potential tourist onslaught. And she could have
delved a bit into Tunisia, where the corrupt former president, Zine el-Abidine
Ben Ali, enriched himself and his cronies by turning the coastline into an
eyesore of cheap hotel towers catering to package tourists. And “Overbooked”
doesn’t engage in much discussion of the moral quandaries raised by tourism in
dictatorships and quasi dictatorships — in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, for
example, where one of the world’s most repressive regimes benefits from every
tourist dollar.
Becker ends
her investigation with a look at tourism in the United States, which followed
an idiosyncratic path after 9/11. While the rest of the world was opening its
doors to foreign visitors, the State Department tightened visa requirements and
foreigners were subjected to humiliating interrogations at entry points, even
jailed when they inadvertently overstayed their welcomes. “Travel to America?
No Thanks,” ran the headline on a scathing article in The Sunday Times of
London. American tour operators call the period a “lost decade,” claiming the
industry lost $94 billion and 200,000 jobs in the first five years after the
attacks. Given the horrors Becker so vividly documents in “Overbooked,” it
might be time for places like Cambodia and Dubai to adopt a similar approach.
Correction:
May 5, 2013
A review on
April 21 about “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism” by
Elizabeth Becker, referred incorrectly to Dubai at one point. As the review
correctly noted elsewhere, it is a city (situated in the emirate of the same
name) in the United Arab Emirates; it is not a country.
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