April 25th - Navigating Venice’s new tourist fee: insights and impacts
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join me, Simon Calder, in today’s travel podcast as I navigate the newly implemented entry fee at Venice's Santa Lucia Station. This fee, targeting daytrippers with a €5 charge on peak days, aims to reduce overcrowding and preserve the city’s heritage. I provide a firsthand account of the inaugural day, including reactions at the checkpoint and insights from local officials on how this fee might reshape tourism in Venice.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder, Thursday, |
| 0:09.7 | me 25th of April, 2024, which will go down in history as the day when the first city |
| 0:18.0 | imposed a charge for day-trippers. Yes, I'm here at Santa Lucia Station in Venice, |
| 0:25.8 | the main arrival point four, the most beautiful city in Italy, many people would say. |
| 0:32.4 | I was the first person across the line of barriers that's here. There's a red one for tourists, there's a green one for people who work or live here or indeed a staying here in hotels. |
| 0:44.3 | It's the day-trippers who they are seeking to charge. |
| 0:49.3 | Five euros, £4.30. |
| 0:52.3 | Ideally should apply online in advance, pay your money by credit card, |
| 0:58.6 | and then get a code which you can print out or put on your phone. But instead, actually, |
| 1:04.0 | I suspect that most people will simply be getting off the train and going to the little kiosk |
| 1:10.0 | where, oh my goodness, there's a whole heap of people now trying to get through the barriers they're showing their forms or indeed they're queuing up at the kiosk which is just away to my left a really strange scene here for the very first time everybody is being |
| 1:30.3 | controlled. There's no physical barrier as such, just a line of people in Hyvis jacket. |
| 1:36.3 | All of them reading Contributo the access to the city of Venice. |
| 1:43.3 | The idea, as I've been hearing from the deputy mayor for tourism, |
| 1:49.0 | Simone Venturini, is simply to dissuade day-trippers, particularly from the local area, |
| 1:59.0 | from places like Bologna, from Milan, Milan from Chiesce from coming in on peak days |
| 2:04.8 | there's 11 of them in a row starting today liberation day in Italy and continuing for almost |
| 2:13.1 | two weeks then it's going to be every weekend up to and including the 14th of July. |
| 2:20.3 | It's stopping in the peak of summer and you might be thinking, well hang on, things are just about to start getting going then. |
| 2:27.3 | But actually that's when the day trips tend to stop from around here because most Italians are going off on holiday to the seaside. |
| 2:36.1 | Anyway, here's what Simone had to tell me. |
| 2:39.8 | Today we are just starting the new system, the entry-fee system, to find the new balance |
... |
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