The Venice entry ticket restarts with new clampdowns
The ticket required to enter Venice for most day-trippers began operation again on 18 April 2025 after it stopped in July 2024. Officially labelled the ‘Venice Access Fee’, day-trippers need to book and pay to enter the city between 8.30 am and 4 pm on 54 designated dates between 18 April and 27 July 2025. Venice residents, working commuters and people who stay a night in the Venice Municipality and pay the tourist accommodation tax do not need to pay the access fee. Residents of the Veneto region are not required to pay or book and can access the city by showing an identity card. But residents of other Italian regions must book and pay. The full list of dates, exemptions and how to pay are available on the official website here: Venice Access Fee
The access fee was a flat €5 per adult for each day of entry last year for a total of 29 days. This year it remains at €5 if booked four or more days before entry. However, the fee has been doubled to €10 per adult if booked within three days before entry. On 22 April 2025, 7,119 payments of €5 were made, while there were 7,906 for €10. Checks were carried out on 10,722 individuals by 90 stewards, supported by verifiers and local police. Between 18-23 April 2025, 150 people were reported and these people will be assessed and either fined or archived if they were permitted exemptions (figures from this website: Ticket d’accesso, stretta sui falsi amici che entrano a Venezia senza pagare. Il Comune: «Ora partono le denunce»).
Fines range from €25 to €150 this year, which is less than the official fine in 2024 of €50 to €300. Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro stated that nobody was fined for access fee violations in 2024, but warned people would be fined this year if they had not obtained the access pass (see Venice expands tourist entry fee system to include more days).
It remains to be seen whether people creating ‘exemption codes’ for the access fee will be fined. Marco Rosa Salva has produced access fee exemption codes that he has made available through a website. These codes can be used to avoid paying the access fee, although Venice City Council has been cancelling them. Residents of Venice can apply for an exemption code for friends to visit them (here: Exemption request). “I find it absurd that they had to think about the friend code for this. This comes up against very serious privacy issues (why should we know who I invite to my house),” observed Rosa Salva, who said he intends to create 100,000 codes. Venice City Tax Councilor Michele Zuin is baffled by Venetians creating these codes and challenging the access fee system. “Honestly, I don’t understand this at all…only Venetians are protesting and the access fee was established to protect residents,” declared Zuin. (see these quotes in: Ticket d’accesso, stretta sui falsi amici che entrano a Venezia senza pagare. Il Comune: «Ora partono le denunce»).
What Zuin and some members of Venice City Council do not understand is that many Venetians and others want the city to be open and not temporarily ‘gated’. People visit Venice for many reasons and should be free to do so. Last year, the access fee was operating on days when students from the Ca’ Foscari University were celebrating their graduations and when the late Pope Francis led mass on St. Mark’s Square. Why did some visitors to these events from outside the Veneto region have to book and pay to attend them? On Sunday 27 April 2025, soccer fans who travel independently to the Venezia against Milan match from outside the Veneto region will have to book and pay to enter Venice.
In addition to restricting freedom of movement and privacy, there is no evidence the access fee has reduced the number of tourists who visit the city. While the access fee ticket was operating during 2024, more tourists entered Venice than in 2023 on the same dates when it had not started. In 2024, “In these days of the ticket the entry of tourists was 747,387 in total. In the same days in 2023 there were 677,590 accesses,” noted Giovanni Andrea Martini, a Venice Councillor for the opposition (Venezia, ticket d’accesso 2025: raddoppiano i giorni. Tariffa di dieci euro e sconto a chi prenote).
With no threshold set for the total number of entries, is Venice City Council really aiming to curb ‘overtourism’? Given the Council made €20,200.00 from the access fee payments on Easter Saturday 19 April 2025 alone, could its members have other motivations? (Ticket d’accesso a quota 14mila, a Pasquetta il Comune incassa 113mila euro)
Dstandish's Weblog 
Your blog states the facts mostly but what are your thoughts on this scheme?
I am against the access fee and instead proposed a 10 point plan to develop Venice to improve tourism and other aspects of the city. This plan is explained in my book: https://dstandish.com/book-information-for-venice-in-environmental-peril-myth-and-reality/
What is your 10-point plan? Or need to buy your book?
What about the Contribution to the city which is badly needed to support the infrastructure, provide services and deliver the resources where all are required by the residents, local merchants and the visitors too. Aren’t the day-trippers the core of the problem were they represent 2/3 of the total footfall while they focus only on 30% of the city by creating the hotspots. These day-trippers bring very minimal economic value which is not spread evenly throughout the city. They stay in the city on average 4-5 hours and after dash away to the next destination.
How will you mitigate all of the above?
I think you would find the book useful for its wider discussion of sustainable development compared with modernisation.
Regarding the 10 point plan, it integrates modernising accommodation, the port and maritime services, parts of the mainland, transportation (including a subway train through the lagoon), regenerating many lagoon islands, and other points to transform Venice for its residents, tourists, students and other city users. For tourism, these changes would spread tourism around the lagoon and the city and could significantly reduce the concetrated overcrowding.
This is much more ambitious than focusing on the day-trippers. Their numbers have not been reduced by the access fee. Last year, the income from the access fee was roughly the same as its running costs. So it is not contributing economically, although this might change.
These are very interesting points to morph Venice into a modern-day metropolis. However, this plan is on the utopia side when considering the native geopolitical landscape in Venice/Veneto/Mestre region and generally in Italy overall. Italy’s tourism GDP derives from presenting their once prosperous past/history to the millions of visitors which makes the politicians in Rome like Daniela Santanchè and the leadership in Venice like Luigi Brugnaro and Simone Venturini to heavily depend to the tourism’s revenue and being influenced by the multinational corporations simply by squeezing Italy for the most tourism revenue.
In the meantime and in the real world, Venice is dealing with the day-tripper problem which is suffocating the ancient city and they do not have any proactive tools to manage such influx of short-term of about 4-5 hour visitors. They do have a Smart Control Room which is a modern tool yet it can only monitor and provide surveillance but all in the reactive mode.
These day-trippers, who represent the bulk of the city’s footfall being over 2/3 of the total, don’t bring any economic value and they spend very little, yet they clog up the city and create the hotspots while focusing only on 30% of the city. All of this interferes with the quality of livability for the residents who are impacted by the constant congestion, higher prices for the rental and housing, higher consumer prices and an inability to live in the city where they were born by not having neighbors but only constant revolving-door visitors. Hence, this is an onset of gentrification.
Today in Venice, there are about 49K inhabitants yet the number of guest beds is greater. Each year in Venice, the body of its inhabitants is shrinking and eventually Venice will become another Pompeii. Needless to say, Venice needs a real and an immediate solution for the inside of the city to reverse the course and manage the flow of visitors and disperse them throughout the city to the remaining 70% which goes unseen without spreading the economic benefit evenly throughout all of the the islands. Today, most of the controls established by the municipality are on the outside of the city such as the limit of the number of allowed cruise ship berths, limits on the licenses for the hotels and STRs, entry point controls, higher tax but zero inside of the city mitigation of Overtourism.
My company has a solution to mitigate Overtourism by managing the visitor flow and spreading on the inside of the city yet when considering the present geopolitical scene in Venice, its contention with Rome and such forces, then all of these politicians will rather see Venice become an outdoor museum than help their constituents who actually vote for them. If the Italians can’t help themselves and don’t let the outside World help them save the World’s heritage, then not even UNESCO can influence their mindset of self-destruction.
Please find below our “City Area Life Cycle – CALC” diagram which illustrates a process of a dying city:
CALC model link: https://touristnewapp.com/calc.png
This model is similar to the TALC model by Prof. Richard Butler.
Thanks. I will check out your diagram.
Thank you!
You have an invite from me on LinkedIn. Let’s connect!