Many vacationers are accustomed to nightly tourism taxes tacked on to their lodge payments.

However daytime taxes are a brand new ask.

Venice’s metropolis council on Tuesday accepted a long-awaited regulation to tax day guests 5 euros ($5.38) to go to the town.

The brand new tax can be carried out over 30 non-consecutive days in 2024, falling on lengthy weekends within the spring and common weekends in the summertime, in keeping with an announcement revealed Tuesday on the town’s web site.

Precise dates can be introduced within the coming weeks, it mentioned.

Usually, the charge will apply to all day vacationers over the age of 14.

In a single day vacationers are exempt, although they’re topic to a separate vacationer tax carried out in 2011. This tax varies by journey season, lodging kind and placement, in keeping with the town’s web site — and is normally between 1 and 5 euros per individual per night time, for the primary 5 nights of a keep.

The brand new tax is an try to “defend the town from mass tourism,” Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s mayor, posted on X, previously often known as Twitter.

“We’ll perform an experiment with nice humility and can attempt to not hurt anybody,” he mentioned, in keeping with a translation of the put up.

Venice has toyed with the thought of taxing day guests for years, as one among a number of measures to curb overtourism within the metropolis — which locals have lengthy blamed for driving up costs and reworking the town right into a souvenir-laden theme park of kinds.

Residents, particularly the estimated 50,000 who stay within the metropolis’s historic space, are far outnumbered by the some 5.5 million who visited the town in 2019 — lots of whom disembark from cruise ships by the hundreds to take pictures of Venice’s well-known canals and metropolis squares.

So-called “hit and run” vacationers characterize almost three out of each 4 guests to Venice, but they contribute lower than 20% to its tourism economic system, in keeping with the Belgium-based information community Euronews.

In keeping with analysis, taxes and fines alone are usually not adequate to sort out overtourism, mentioned Tatyana Tsukanova, a analysis affiliate at EHL Hospitality Enterprise College in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The town of Venice at the moment fines guests who eat or drink on the bottom, sit on monuments and bridges, or swim in its canals, in keeping with the town’s web site.

Tsukanova cited Bhutan, which reopened in 2022 with a $200 day by day vacationer charge imposed to draw “excessive worth, low quantity” vacationers. Earlier this summer time, the nation halved the charge to spur extra vacationers to go to.

Whereas Bhutan’s tax could have labored a bit too properly, Venice’s tax will not be sufficient to disincentivize vacationers who’ve come from afar to see the traditional metropolis.

Kumar Vinnakota, a lawyer in Dallas, Texas, mentioned he would not assume twice about paying 5 euros to go to Venice.

“Most cities world wide have vacationer taxes or lodge taxes paid by vacationers anyway,” he mentioned.