Tourism has taken over Venice. These five short words summarize the situation in Venice at the moment. This paper will focus on solving the problematic of mass tourism in Venice including the out-crowding effect of residents with a focus on policy issues in Venice. During the last decades Venice has been losing its residents, economic activity outside of tourism and political centrality (Russo and Sans, 2009).
The first part of this paper is desk research. Here you can find information about topics that I use in the second and third part of the paper ‘own critical reflection’ and ‘own solution’. Some existing solutions will be discussed and criticized, and solutions I thought of will be explained. A lot of ideas to make Venice a sustainable destination are rejected by the Italian authorities. To find a solution for the problem ‘mass-tourism’, the problems with the authorities need to be dealt with at first hand because this is where the solutions are kept. There has to be a recognition that the situation in Venice is problematic and that this needs to be solved. Everyone should be on the same wavelength and have the same vision. There is more to Venice than just the St. Mark’s square and its surroundings, that is why the Venetian tourism board produced a map where tourists can find the more unknown places in Venice. But is this enough?
2. Desk Research
Over the past decades visitor arrivals have increased fiercely with nowadays (2011) 2,5 million of tourist arrivals and more than 6 million overnight stays in the historic city. Venice welcomes an average of 50.000-60.000 visitors a day, around the same as the amount of residents that live in the city at the moment. This pressure, especially from day trippers, is disqualifying Venice as a tourist destination. The increase in traffic from cruise ships puts additional pressure on Venice’s infrastructure. This asks for good management of tourism which is not the case in Venice (Massiani and Santoro, 2012).
2.1 Day trippers
A total number of 22,500 daily arrivals is the optimal level of arrivals where the tourists can enjoy the city and where citizens can use all their facilities without being overcrowded by tourists. No more than 10,700 of these 22,500 daily arrivals should be excursionists or day trippers. At the moment there are a lot more arrivals and a lot more excursionists. This growth in day trippers can be explained because the hotel prices decrease when the distance from the historic city increases. Excursionists visit Venice most in summer which brings instability to the city (Russo, 2002).
2.1.1 Cruises
As mentioned before, Venice receives 50.000-60.000 visitors a day and a part of them are day trippers who come to Venice with cruise ships. In 15 years, there is a 439% increase in dockings (McHugh, 2015). This growth has been pressing on the city’s tourist infrastructure (e.g. erosion) (Massiani and Santoro, 2012). Since January 2014, the Italian government reduced the number of cruise ships (over 40,000 tonnes) by 20 percent. But already a few months later the law was suspended due to the poverty of prove about the risks the cruise ships bring to the city (Saffron Synergies , 2014). According to M. Gray (2014) there were two proposals to reroute the cruises at the time of writing (2014) and the city was still awaiting a decision from the Italian government. The first plan, which is preferred by the tourism industry, is to straighten and widen the canal. The second plan is to build an offshore terminal where tourists can than go to shore by smaller boats (Gray, 2014). Another ban on large cruise ships, introduced in November 2014, has been obliterated by Venice’s regional court of appeal. This regulation would have banned ships over 96,000 tons from docking at the main cruise terminal and would have limited the number of cruise ships over 40,000 gross tons to five a day. The Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) said that its member lines voluntarily choose not to bring large cruise ships and that they were waiting for a final decision by the Italian government regarding an alternative route (Shaddock, 2015).
In December 2016, green light was given by the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to construct a new terminal further away from the tourists. At the moment, only this project has passed every stage of selection. The new project will respect the environment of Venice and its lagoon. Five large ships will be able to dock at the new terminal, which will be located at Bocca di Lido. The project is a ‘project of Public Interest’ by the Italian Ministry, they want tourists to have the opportunity to visit Venice while preserving the environment. Although green light was given by the ministry for the Environment’s EIA, according to the website of the European Commission the project is still waiting for permission of the Ministry of Environment and they are awaiting a political decision (Giliberto, 2016; European Commission, 2016).
(European Commission, 2016)
2.2 Crowding out
People from the historic city are moving onto the mainland. This crowding out effect exists because the cost to own a house in the city is rising, it is difficult to find employment outside of tourism and there is a reduction of life quality because of over-crowding and congestion. The locals feel like they live in a kind of Disneyland, mainly because of the unmannered behaviors of some tourists like picnicking at holy sites, stealing gondolas at night and sunbathing in the streets of Venice. Residents also say that the rise of cruise ships leaves more negative effects than positive, these visitors often have their own tour guides and don’t pay anything for museums, restaurants or hotels. Often they just visit the most famous sites and take pictures and leave nothing but litter behind. According to locals, the tourism problem hasn’t been addressed by city officials of governmental entities. Venetians insist they still want tourists to come, but they want the number of tourists to be better managed and they want the city to control their behavior by for example providing more local police who stop visitors from sleeping on the bridges and from swimming in the canals. A love-hate relationship can be noticed between tourists and residents. People who work in the tourism sector want visitors to come because they thank their daily income to them but other residents live in spite of tourism (Mchugh, 2015; Unesco,sd; Quinn, 2007).
2.3 Detourism
A large problem in Venice is that some resources are under-utilized, e.g. some attractions that visitors don’t know about and hotels that are not fully occupied, while other resources are over-utilized, e.g. St. Mark’s Square (Russo, 2002). The city of Venice has been trying to promote slow and sustainable tourism with their Detourism Campaign. They want to encourage tourists to see Venice through the eyes of a local by going beyond the main tourist sights and attractions. They made a map of Venice called ‘the other map of Venice’ which was made in 2014, they also made a web magazine about detourism which visitors can view online and a newsletter with new ideas every week (Detourism, sd).
2.4 Authorities
Until the 1990s tourism wasn’t a central feature in politics and planning policies although it was already important for the city’s economy. The decrease in inhabitants can be connected to deindustrialization and issues in housing that were never opposed by policies (for example by promoting the residents as first byers). Touristic uses have taken over today’s buildings and homes, such as hotels but also informal uses like Airbnb. During Massimo Cacciari term as mayor (1993-2000 and 2005-2010) the city’s role as a tourism destination was maintained and expanded. Even during Paolo Costa’s mandate (2000-2005) the city’s policy’s continued to stay the same, although this mayor promoted the idea of ‘carrying capacity’ before the elections (Vianello, 2017).
Today’s mayor of Venice since June 2015, Luigi Brugnaro, doesn’t see mass tourism as an emergency. He says that without tourists Venice has nothing and that the city should be open for everyone. But he recognizes that there aren’t many benefits to short-stay tourism so they are thinking to let day-trippers pay more and letting the contribution drop for every extra night spent. The mayor already gave locals priority boarding on water taxis by creating separate queues (Ferrigo,2016; McCabe, 2016).
Tourism is a threat to Venice but at the same time their main source of income. Citizens of Venice asked Unesco to put the city on the danger list of world heritage sites, they fear the city is becoming a museum. Unesco has given the city’s officials several options such as higher taxes for excursionists or barriers to control the amount of visitors but neither one has been put into practice. Residents, academics and local politicians point out the damage cruise ships bring to the lagoon. The mayor doesn’t want to ban them and explains that they facilitate thousands of local jobs but he looks at an opportunity for a voluntary contribution from the cruise liners (Legorano, 2016; Philipson, 2015; Tourism-Review, 2016).
3. Own critical reflection
The reason why I wanted to write this paper about the mass-tourism problem in Venice with a more political approach is because I think this is where the key issue lies. Many solutions can be introduced but when policy makers aren’t cooperative, then I think even the best solutions will be ignored. I understood Venice had a problem like this during and after our seminar with Nicola Callergara about Tourism Policy in Venice. They want to promote sustainable tourism in their city but they don’t want to lose any tourists or they don’t want to make big changes. Mr. Callegara explained us that they had made a map about detourism in Venice named: ‘The other map of Venice’. The map was produced in 2014 but after asking how this map would get to the tourist, he answered that the map isn’t available for tourists yet which is peculiar because the map was already produced two years ago.
It seems like the tourism board and the authorities don’t see the urging problem of overcrowding in Venice. They recognize them but it feels like they actually don’t want to solve the problems and still try to attract more tourists. After asking the Italian students, during our trip, about mass tourism in Venice they answered that they were concerned about the problem but they say that they can’t tell the tourists to stop coming. An environmental organization, Italia Nostra, says that 60,000 tourists are coming to the lagoon city everyday while it can only handle half of it. They suggest that Venice should attract fewer and more high class tourists instead of all tourists (Englisch Online, sd). My opinion is that they should attract fewer tourists but by attracting more tourists who stay for at least one night.
Venice has no control on excursionists that stay in hotels further from the historic center. They could if they started with entry prices for Venice but this will just stimulate the thought of Venice as a Disneyland. What they can control is the embarking of cruise ships at the port of Venice. As you can read in part 2.1.1 more than one idea has been proposed and it looks like they found a project that could help preserving the city and its lagoon. Though this project looks very promising for the environment, in my opinion it won’t stop the overload of excursionists who visit Venice, which again has a negative effect on the environment. What should happen then is a control on how many and how large cruise ships can embark every day at the port. But it seems that the regional court of appeal and the tourism board of Venice don’t want this kind of change in the city. These excursionists actually bring a lot of negative impacts like explained in part 2.2 which makes locals feel displaced in their own city. Shorter visits also make a lot more congestion costs. Maybe the policy makers should investigate on those negative impacts and study them together with the positive impacts excursionists bring.
Luckily today’s mayor recognizes that day-trippers don’t bring many positive effects (see 2.4) so maybe he can make some changes in the future. A decrease in excursionists from cruise ships will probably not happen in the near future because this provides a lot of jobs for locals.
4. Own solution
A solution which I thought of to attract more tourists who stay for at least one night is late evening or night tourism. While we were in Venice we witnessed that after around 8pm the city becomes a ghost town. With promoting evening tourism they could convert excursionists into tourists who stay for one or more nights. The evening tourism could start from around 10pm, if these are very attractive activities for tourists they could win over tourists who would normally stay in a hotel outside the city to stay in a hotel inside the city. An idea is to make a lightshow that shows the history of Venice on one of the buildings. People on a cruise won’t be able to stay during the night but a lot of visitors will still go on a cruise (instead of staying in a hotel in the city) because Venice is just one stop-over and they have a lot more places they can visit while on a cruise. So to have less excursionists in the city they have to decrease the number of visitors who come by cruise. A solution could be to ask entry prices, only for visitors who come by cruise, as a compensation for spending almost nothing in the city. When this new terminal would come in the future where cruise ships embark, entry prices could be asked easily when they go onto the smaller boats to visit the city, especially in peak season.
This solution could solve several problems. First cruise ships won’t be able to embark close to the city but at a new terminal further away from the city, this will help protect Venice’s infrastructure. Second, less excursionists will enter the city because more people will want to stay inside the city (night tourism) and less people from cruise ships will visit the city because they have to pay a supplement. A third point is that no jobs will be lost, even more jobs will be created. The only negative point about this solution could be for the Venetians because then people will visit the city late in the evening and at night as well and we saw in the movie ‘the Venice Syndrome’ that residents like the silence at night. But they should see this night tourism as a compensation for less crowded places during the day.
When the excursionist problem is solved the detourism map could also be more effective. Because in my opinion detourism is no solution when you don’t find a solution for the excursionist problem first. Excursionists won’t do these activities promoted in the detourism map if they only have one day to spent in Venice. The detourism map could also be an efficient instrument to show tourists that there is a problem in Venice due to mass tourism. And also to show them that there is more to Venice than just St. Mark’s Square and its surroundings. That brings me to the fact that the whole Veneto region has a lot to offer like other art cities, the dolomites and the Riviera del Brenta (Veneto Region, 2016).
The decline in residents could be turned with ‘gentrification’. This means that urban areas in decay will get renewed because people with middle and high class incomes come to live in these areas (Bureau AAT, sd). If this happens in Venice the city could regain a normal lifestyle and more jobs other than in tourism would be available again. More regulations surrounding Airbnb could also help people stay in the city because more homes will be available for rent for the residents.