Day trippers to Venice will have to pay a $5.50 tourist fee as the city tries to curb excessive tourism

• Some visitors to Venice will have to start paying a daily 5 euros ($5.36) tourist fee next year.
• The city said the initiative wasn't designed to raise cash but to give residents a better quality of life.

Some visitors to Venice will have to start paying a daily tourist fee of 5 euros ($5.36) next year. The initiative covers the introduction of a new tourist flow management system to discourage day trippers on certain dates.

The city's municipal council on Tuesday agreed to an amended version of a resolution to trial the fee, which will go to the city council for approval on September 12. It covers Venice itself, as well as other smaller islands in the lagoon.

The system will be trialled in 2024 for around 30 days, which the council will announce soon, with a focus on long public holiday weekends and summer weekends.

Day tourists over the age of 14 will have to pay the fee to visit the Old City. Residents of Veneto, the province that includes Venice, won't pay any contributions but will have to book online. Further information will be released on how long each contribution is valid for and the cost, which could change.

Simone Venturini, the city's tourism councilor, said that the initiative wasn't designed to raise cash and that the money raised would only cover the costs of the scheme. Instead, it was designed to give residents a better quality of life and improve the experience for overnight tourists, the council said.

Venice has been blighted by booming tourism, which skyrocketed in the years leading up to the pandemic, causing a rift with local residents. The number of visitors exploded from 3.4 million in 2009 to 5.5 million in 2019 – an increase of more than 60% in a decade, according to local authorities.

Numbers plummeted during the pandemic amid waves of lockdowns, sinking to 1.3 million in 2020, those they rose to 2.1 million the next year, the most recent year for which the local authorities released data. Though fewer visitors have been coming, they've been spending slightly more time in the city, the data show, with visitors staying an average of 2.7 nights in 2021.

The coastal city — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 with more than 100 surrounding islands, countless bridges, and notable architecture — frequently features of the list of the world's most beautiful places. The city center itself has only about 50,000 residents.

Around two-thirds of the visitors to Venice in 2021 were foreigners, with the top countries of origins being Germany, France, USA, Austria, and Spain, according to the data.

Seven of every 10 visitors stayed in the city's historical center, one of its three districts, the data show.

Venice has increasingly been hit by the affects of climate change, including flooding and fears that the city is sinking. The country's government banned large cruise ships from docking in the Venice lagoon in 2021 after UNESCO warned it could put the city on its endangered list. This July, the UN arts and culture body recommended adding Venice to its endangered list, alongside some cities in Ukraine, saying officials weren't doing enough to protect the Italian city from excessive tourism levels and climate change.

Nearly 5.2 million foreign tourists stayed in tourist accommodation in Italy in May, according to the country's statistics office.