Venice urged to charge €100 tourist tax

Telegraph

29-07-2025

Venice is so overwhelmed by low-budget tourists who spend a pittance that visitors should be charged €100 each to enter the city, one of its most prominent business leaders has said.
'We're in a state of emergency – tourists no longer buy anything. I'd make them pay €100 a head,' said Setrak Tokatzian, the owner of a historic jewellery shop and the president of the association of businesses of St Mark's Square, in the heart of the World Heritage city.
Day-trippers are already charged between €5 and €10 per person to enter Venice under a controversial scheme introduced by the city council last year.
But Mr Tokatzian's proposal goes far beyond that. He takes issue, in particular, with budget holidaymakers who stay in campsites on the mainland and arrive in Venice on coaches and buses.
'Every day I see rivers of people who arrive in the city but have no real goal. They drift from one part of the city to another, led by tour guides, they go on gondolas, they take water taxis, they rush here and there, but no one buys anything,' he said.
'They arrive in the morning on coaches and they leave in the afternoon without having spent a euro. I hate to say it, but this kind of tourism is dreadful.'
High-end businesses are suffering from the preponderance of low spending 'hit-and-run' day-trippers, he added, saying: 'You don't see people walking past with handbags bought in designer shops, as used to happen in the past.'
When tourists do buy bags and belts, they buy cheap imitation goods from unauthorised hawkers, many of them Senegalese and Bangladeshi immigrants.
'I've seen families sharing a single dish in a restaurant. There are queues at the water fountains to get water because people don't even want to buy that. I ask myself, where are the beautiful people, those who are interested in the city, those who really bring something to the city?' said Mr Tokatzian.
He said day-trippers 'don't walk into shops but instead take selfies as they feed seeds to the pigeons [in St Mark's Square]. Legal business owners don't sell anything, but we have to watch the hawkers make hundreds of euros a day selling stuff illegally. Does that seem fair?'
But Roberto Panciera, the president of Confcommercio Venezia, another business association, said it was wrong to victimise tourists on a budget.
Venice is having a tough time economically because of other broader factors, from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to inflation, the cost of living crisis and the tariff wars threatened by Donald Trump.
Retail businesses in Venice are also being hurt by online shopping. 'Tourists often photograph what they see in a shop window and then look for similar and less expensive products on the internet,' said Mr Panciera.
Venice city council, meanwhile, announced that the entrance fee initiative has come to an end for this year. More than 720,000 visitors paid between €5 and €10 to enter the city on the 54 peak days during which the levy was charged, the city said.
The fee, which applied to day-trippers and not to people spending at least one night in a hotel in Venice, brought in €5.4 million. Last year, when the entrance fee was introduced, it applied to 29 peak days and brought in €2.4 million to the city's coffers.
Critics of the project said the entrance fee had made no difference to limiting the number of tourists swamping Venice.
They claim that little by little, Venice is haemorrhaging inhabitants and becoming a cultural Disneyland – an issue highlighted by the high-profile wedding last month of Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest men, to Lauren Sanchez, an American television journalist.
Campaigners accused the Amazon founder of treating Venice as a rich man's playground, a picturesque backdrop to a wedding believed to have cost tens of millions of dollars.
Venice's population decline has been precipitous, from more than 170,000 residents in the 1950s to around 48,000 now.
But the authorities insist the tourist entrance ticket was helping tackle the scourge of over-tourism.
Venice became the first city in the world to introduce a payment system for tourists when it adopted the scheme in April last year.
'The system has worked well in its second year, showing that we can reconcile the aim of regulating the flow of day-trippers with maintaining accessibility and transparency,' said Michele Zuin, of Venice city council.
'The aim of the system is not to make money – the funds received will be used for projects that will benefit Venice's residents.'
Simone Venturini, the council official in charge of tourism, said the data collected from the entrance fee scheme would be analysed and used to better manage tourist numbers.
Venice has adopted a number of measures in the last year to try to manage the impact of over-tourism, including limiting the size of tourist groups to 25. The council has also decreed that guides can no longer use loudspeakers because they are annoying and intrusive for other visitors.