Venice is introducing a variety of new measures to combat overtourism, such as fees, tourist surveillance, and pre-booking reservations.
This follows other past efforts the Italian city has proposed to combat overcrowding on its streets and waterways, such as electronic turnstiles and its historic cruise ship ban.
Now, Venice is set to implement 468 CCTV cameras, optical sensors and a mobile phone-tracing system to track tourists, as reported by CBC. These new surveillance measures will detect where tourists are coming from, where they are going to, and how fast they are moving. Using these measures, Venice authorities will get a sense of how crowded the city is every 15 minutes, including where tourist hotspots are as well as other key real-time information.
According to Skift, Venice authorities are also preparing a system that requires tourists to pre-book their visit on an app and charge day-trippers between $3.50 and $12 to enter depending on the time of the year. Residents, students and commuters will be exempt from the fees, as well as those spending at least one night in a Venice hotel as they will have already paid the overnight fee of 5 euros per day to stay in the city.
Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro says his aim is to make tourism to the city more sustainable, but admits that these new measures may be hard to sell. Pre-pandemic, Venice was visited by 25 million people each year.
“I expect protests, lawsuits, everything … but I have a duty to make this city liveable for those who inhabit it and also for those who want to visit,” he said.
According to CBC, Mayor Brugnaro and Venice authorities are still unsure on how many people are considered too many, and the new rules are expected to take effect some time between summer 2022 and the beginning of 2023. Measures to restrict overtourism were proposed in 2019, but were proposed during the pandemic. However, the movement grew during the lockdown as Venetians were able to see their city without the presence of millions for the first time in a long while, reported Skift.
Around 193,000 people packed into Venice's city center on a single day during the 2019 Carnival, and the city is hoping to limit this.
“There is a physical limitation on the number of people that can be in the city at the same time,” said Marco Bettini, director general of Venis, the IT company that built the monitoring system in partnership with phone operator TIM.
Mayor Brugnaro dismissed privacy concerns, saying that data was collected anonymously. “There’ll be conditions attached to obtain priority bookings and discounts,” he said. “You can’t come in your swimming suit. You can’t jump from a bridge or get drunk. Whoever comes must respect the city.”
Venetians in the city center, which have decline to 55,000 in total compared to 175,000 in the 1960s, have mixed opinions on the proposed measures. Some are worried it will deter tourists and turn the city into a theme park, while others back the idea of deterring day-trip tourists.
As reported by Open Jaw, the new surveillance measures and fees follow the city's other efforts to combat overtourism such as its cruise ship ban and proposed electronic turnstiles for tourist entry.
