‘It’s a joke’: Venice brings in ‘shambolic’ tourist fee | Dispatch

Hello from Venice, where today is a huge day because it’s the first time that the city is charging day tripping tourists to enter the cost for your ticket €5. The question is, is this a good thing? City Council said it could curb tourism, whereas local campaign groups say it’s turning the city into a theme park. So the way it works, there are no ticket gates, but what you need to do is you need to go online and get AQR code like this. So if you’re just a day tripper, you have to go on and pay €5 to get this. If you’re staying at a hotel, you just need to say which hotel you’re staying at and then you get sent the QR code for free. So behind me is one of the main bridge entry points into Venice, and as you can see, there’s many hundreds of people crossing over it. Right now. There’s a couple of people in orange or yellow bibs who are supposed to be checking people’s tickets, but clearly there’s far too many people entering the city to check even a fraction of their QR codes. What’s interesting is that even at these quieter entry points like the one behind me, they’re not even checking people’s tickets there. It seems that they’re kind of just wanting to be a presence rather than actually scanning QR codes. Today it finally happened. They finally checked my ticket. I must have walked over these bridges 20 times looking like a tourist. But for the first time, somebody actually asked me for my QR code and it got the green light. Good news. And has anybody checked your QR code? Not yet. Not yet. Basically, we don’t know where where the QR code will be checked. So did you know that there’s an entry fee to Venice today? Yeah, I know. I know. From the social media. And do you have a ticket? Yeah, I have a ticket. Did anyone, did anyone check it? No, they’re actually just behind you. There’s loads of people back there, but they don’t seem to be checking anyone’s tickets. All right, I didn’t know that, I didn’t know this, so yeah, it’s kind of joke. The reason the entry fee is controversial is that the money raised from this €5 day trip at entry fee isn’t actually going back into the city. It’s not going into projects to improve life for locals, It is simply going into funding the ticketing system itself. So the question is, if €5 isn’t enough to put people off coming, which judging from today it certainly hasn’t, what’s the point? Thousands of people protesting and their message is united, they do not want the entry fee and they’re making that statement loud. It’s been perfectly peaceful protest so far, although things just got tiny bit heated up with the protest groups pushing up against the police barricade there. The ticket for Venice is a very bad thing for our city because Venice is not a museum. Venice is a free city. They are taking data, sensible data about all the citizenship or the people that live in Veneto or from the other regions in Italy or the other states in the world. And it’s kind of controlling, you know, just a way to turn venues into a capitalist Luna Park. We have to concentrate more on houses and not just tickets. The protest which started in the main square at all the bus arrivals now moving into the city centre itself. There’s many, many thousands of people walking along pretty tight canal side walkways. I’m now out of the main protest and in Venice’s historic city centre where things are comparatively quite peaceful today. And it’s all been a bit of a shambles, hasn’t it? I mean, barely any tourists have had their QR codes checked. The locals are furious they’ve marched in their thousands. Fair enough. Venice does need to do something about their over tourism problem, but it really doesn’t feel like this is it.