Today, Explained - The tourist tax

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Venice is drowning in tourists. A new fee for day-trippers is the latest tool aimed at keeping overtourism at bay. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! vox.com/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You hear the one about the Chicago rat hole? You hear about this thing? No, no, what thing? It was there in Roscoe Village for decades. Some rat, or maybe a squirrel, had clearly fallen into wet cement, and its imprint was sitting there in the sidewalk for everyone to see. But then, early this year, a comedian tweeted a photo of the rat hole, and it became a sensation.

It became a sensation. It became a tourist destination, a mecca. Now dozens are paying their respects to the rat, dubbed Chimley, with coins, alcohol, flowers and of course cheese. There's been a proposal and an actual wedding there in the last week. The rat hole became such a nuisance that the city had to get rid of it. But don't worry, there are Chicago rat holes all over the world. Venice is one of them. But you can't just lift Venice out of Italy because too many people are showing up to see it. So instead, Venice has introduced attacks.

We're going to hear about it on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that's... Today Explained, Ramos Furham. When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine.

Colleen Barry, correspondent for the Associated Press in Italy. Venice is a very beautiful city. It's set among canals and you have gorgeous architecture reflecting the Middle East and the West. It's this meeting place of East and West and there's been a lot of art that's come out of Venice. And so people are just drawn to the place. Besides just seeing the city the Biennale is on now, which is a great art fair that's every two years. But people just go to walk the narrow alleyways and cross the bridges and go to Piazza San Marco. And the Rialto Bridge is the famous bridge that arches over the Grand Canal. Go down the Grand Canal on a boat.

Get in a gondola. I mean, there are just endless things to do. And it's just gorgeous and romantic and just a nice place to hang out. And the problem here is that everyone seems to know that? Yeah, I mean, the dawn of low-cost tourism has certainly brought a lot of people to Venice. On very crowded days, and I've seen this myself particularly during Carnevale, they have to set the pedestrian traffic through these narrow alleyways going one way only. It's just, it's too crowded to have people going in both directions.

And you get to a place like Piazza San Marco on the first day of Carnavale and it's just packed. And I went there seven, eight years ago with friends of mine, maybe 10 years ago. And they had just landed from the United States. I picked them up at the airport. We parked nearby. We went into the city. Within 10 minutes, we couldn't find each other.

We were on phones. We knew we were close to each other, but we just couldn't see each other. It was so packed, and we were very close to each other. I will never go back on that day. I was reading in the local paper today that even over this weekend, the buses have been so packed with tourists coming in and taking the water bus through the Judeca Canal, which is the big canal that you would take

to avoid going through the Grand Canal, which is a more scenic canal. It's the quicker way around. That residents who live on the Judeca could not get on the water bus to go about their business. They couldn't take their kids to soccer practice. They couldn't make appointments that they had. They had to let two or three water buses go by until there was room for them on there. There's no indication of

a tour operator educating the visitors to, you know, respect the locals, respect the size and the layout of this town, which is very, very unique. The tourism official for the city told me between 30,000 to 40,000 day trippers starts to put the city into overdrive where it's difficult to manage. Remember, everything's difficult in Venice if you are moving around. Trash removal is difficult. Doing deliveries in Venice is difficult. Bringing things around the alleyways, bringing things on the boats. It's just much more difficult than in a regular city. The other big problem that Venice faces is that it's losing residents. We don't have enough flats for inhabitants. So people are moving away because you cannot find a place to live here. Losing people, losing inhabitants means losing the character of the city.

You know, now it's becoming Disneyland. I spoke to one woman. She said she has lived in Venice for 30 years. She married a Venetian. She moved into a building near the Rialto. While she was raising her family, the whole building was filled with families. Now, everyone's moved away. Three of the apartments in her

building are now short-term rentals, and there's no butcher down the street anymore. So, it's just a much more difficult place to live. You have people coming and going in your building. And sort of the unbridled spread of short-term rentals is another problem that residents talk about. Last year, Venice passed this very telling moment where the number of tourist beds now outnumbers the number of permanent residents in the city. So we're down to fewer than 50,000 permanent residents. If you don't have permanent residents, you don't have doctors, you don't have activities for kids, you don't have grocery stores, hardware stores, the kind of things that people need in their lives. All the butchers, the bakers, the pharmacies, the, you know, the dressmakers are

all going and being replaced by souvenir shops. We are losing the meaning of the city. So everyone wants to go to Venice. This has become a problem for Venice. And Venice has a plan to deal with this. Tell me what it is. So they are charging day trippers five euros to access the city

on 29 days this year. They started on April 25th, which was a holiday in Italy, and they're going through toward the end of July, mostly weekends. I've looked at the numbers, and in the first seven days, they've had 129,568 people pay that fee. So they've cashed in nearly 650,000 euros. Wow. What's the goal of the fee? Is it to make money or is it to deter people from coming or neither, both? What?

The city administration say they want to create a better balance for residents so they can access the water buses and so they don't have people crowding under people's houses. The trippers can be, during some days of the year, overwhelming. And we are going to make that much money. If it does become something that they do permanently, the money will be used for maintenance and upkeep of the city. So our goal is not to collect money, but to discourage the choice of some particular days from the day trippers. I think that humanity has one duty, to preserve and safeguard Venice. If this system helps us to do that, I think that the system is good. How are Venetians responding? How do the locals feel about it? Well, there's a very vocal group who is against it. Vocal locals?

Vocal locals. There were hundreds of people protesting against it on the first day last week. And they were sort of kept over in this area along a canal. And then they marched over to one of the access points where they were met by riot police. You know, this one woman I spoke to has been living there for 30 years, was carrying this mock passport, and in it she had a citation from the Italian Constitution which guarantees citizens freedom of movement in the country. We're at the European Union, and Italy and its constitution guarantees free passage, like the Schengen Treaty, in all the territories of the Union and of Italy. So it's not clear why Venice should be any different.

I will just say that the residents don't feel that this is really addressing the issues that need to be addressed to bring people back to Venice. This is not Pompeii. This is a city where we have to fight to have the houses lived in by families. And we have to reopen local shops. This would also limit wild tourism. One of them is to bring back more public housing, to manage better the short-term rentals.

Venice has several universities. They've talked for years about kind of using the Boston model to keep young people in Venice. And, you know, people who come to the city, go to school there, you fall in love with the place and you want to stay. But you have to have industries. You have to have jobs. You have to have things that people can look forward to doing. And right now, tourism is the main industry. And a lot of people who go to university aren't going to want to then become waiters. You were just there. Does it feel like this is working? Does it feel less crowded? Does it feel more functional? Or is it still a big mess? This is a brand new system.

So we took the train in. The train was packed and I kind of expected to run into a lot of people checking, but we didn't go straight out of the main train station. We went out toward Piazza di Roma, which is where the buses come in. And there were the cluster of checkers and they were just clustered talking to each other and not checking people when we went by. 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. And that's what residents predicted. It's not going to discourage one person from coming. If Venice is on your bucket list and you really want to see it, you're going to pay those five euros. Even if you're deciding to stay in Treviso to save a little bit of money, you're going to pay those five euros. Maybe a family, maybe an Italian family, they might be the people who are harder hit by it

because getting on a train and adding 20 euros if you're a family of four, that does sort of up what you're spending. You know, it feels like Venice is in a bit of a catch-22 because tourism is clearly their biggest industry and yet it's threatening to make them uninhabitable. And now they've got this plan, but you're saying early looks makes it seem like it ain't going to do the trick. Where do we go? Yeah. When I talk to activists in the city,

they would like to have more dialogue with the city about what can be done to bring it back. And they say that dialogue isn't happening. Something like this can't really be top-down. You have to have initiatives that kind of, you know, build off of each other, and you create your own ecosystem. And there was a lot of talk about that after the pandemic. I did one story talking to a lot of people with a lot of great ideas about how to bring the city

back, drawing people away from the usual sites and getting them to see other parts of Venice or places on the mainland that may be similar to kind of take the pressure off. Colleen Berry, it was a pleasure speaking with you. Ciao. Ciao. Colleen Berry, AP. When we're back on TE, we've got a lot more ideas on how to deal with over-tourism. Just in time for your summer travel planning.

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Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. Ciao. Sto ascoltando, oggi spiegato. Today explain, explain, explain. So I want to tell you the story about a brilliant writer and poet called William Wordsworth, who was English. And he lived in a beautiful part of England called the Lake District. And he wrote a guidebook about it. And he wrote in his guidebook that he wanted to object to a railway that was going to be planned to the Lake District because he felt it would bring too many tourists. And the date that he wrote this guidebook, 1810. So this is not a new

phenomenon we're talking about. Much like the brilliant writer and poet William Wordsworth, Justin Francis has been thinking about places being played out for a while. In 2000, he founded a company called Responsible Travel. Their whole thing is... Overtourism is a word that entered kind of the popular vocabulary around 2017. What is it? It's when we have uncontrolled and unmanaged tourism that goes so far that the quality of life of the people who live in the destination becomes degraded and the quality of the experience of the visitors becomes degraded often cruise destinations are a hot spot venice is one of those um to brovnik

it's become a sort of theme park. Either that or you have to get here really early in the morning, like at 5am so you can take good photos. Some of the national parks in the US in peak periods are suffering from over-tourism. Officials there say hikers had to wait up to four hours just to enter certain trails. Little villages which have been film sets in movies,

suddenly finding local people cannot get into their town, the place they call home. The roads are just gridlocked by people taking photos. When Joaquin Phoenix danced down these Bronx steps in The Joker, fans quickly followed in his footsteps, turning a steep staircase into a social media sensation. The beach, you know, in Southeast Asia, made famously by DiCaprio's movie, The Beach.

Let's go back a few years. It was a beach on the sand. A beach. Precious natural environment destroyed by sheer volume of tourists. So it's a truly global phenomenon, and not just in big cities, but in small local areas as well. What are the drivers of over-tourism?

You mentioned movies. If a place was used in a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, chances are people are going to show up sometime to see it. But what else is going on here? I mean, let's call it what it is, Sean. It's exploitation of a place by an industry. Mm. Sean, it's exploitation of a place by an industry. You know, it is out and out, an industry going in,

taking what it can and running off with it. Local authorities, many local authorities are not set up, have not been set up to manage that, or even to realise that tourism needed managing. They haven't realised the hidden cost in chasing the number of tourists. One million, I want two million, I want ten million. New Zealand, there's no place like it on Earth. In chasing that, they haven't recognised the hidden cost.

One of the other big drivers has been the growth of holiday rentals. In a 2018 study, researchers said that Airbnb's presence in a market shrinks supply of long-term rentals, which results in price increases. Holiday rentals essentially take somewhere that could have been a place for a young person to rent or get their first home out of the housing market. And that, of course, causes massive inflation at the cost of finding somewhere to live and somewhere to rent.

So it's lack of awareness, lack of management, growth of holiday rentals and social media, which has rapidly drawn us to a smaller and smaller number of places. Sometimes in search of a photo of ourselves to build our personal brand more than the experience the perfect eiffel tower photo op does exist the internet told me where to go and i'm going you know i traveled a lot and i always took photos but it was to remember the experience i had

but for some people now the purpose for going is the photo itself. So I feel there's a bit of a battle for the soul of travel. For me, it's about experiences. But I feel there's a bit of a battle for the soul of travel there. Do we risk sounding elitist or that we're judgmental if we're saying, you know, you should be taking a photo to remember a moment, not to build your personal brand, not to, you know, look glamorous in front of the Coliseum, whatever it might be. Definitely there's a risk of sounding elitist. But I'm going to stick with it a little bit. And I'm going to say that what I cherish about travel is fulfillment, rejuvenation, adventure, learning.

Learning about places written people that are very different to me sometimes realizing that actually we're more similar than we are different and i do prize that and if if that sounds a little bit elitist then then i recognize the criticism but i'm going to stand by what I think the real beauty of travel is. By all means, take a photo too. Gucci! Okay, so it doesn't sound like you're saying stop traveling. It sounds like you're saying travel differently.

How does one travel differently, responsibly, ethically, whatever it might be so um i would encourage you to stay in a local hotel or accommodation that's locally owned rather than um holiday rental i know they're very popular i know they're very um affordable but a hotel is not going to take away a room from somebody who could have been renting it or or buying it so i'm going to encourage you to stay in a hotel or locally in accommodation i'm going to encourage you to hire a local guide somebody from the community who will know how to avoid the crowds who will know where to take you for a more enjoyable time and will be able to advise you on any sort of local sensitivities that you might not be aware of you know religious or cultural so I think you'll get a better experience that way. It's a job for them, and I think it will help reduce tourism impacts. If you can, I'm going to encourage you to travel away from the peak season.

Not always possible if you've got a family, but it'll take the pressure off the destination a little bit. I think you'll enjoy it more as well. And I'm also going to encourage you to spend a day or two of your trip away from the famous hotspot and go and visit somewhere else, perhaps less visited, perhaps that would welcome more tourists, where you might see a bit more of real local life. You know, it's interesting.

We spoke to Colleen about the Venice tourist tax. What more can governments do as travel becomes cheaper, social media recommendations become more pervasive, and, you know, more and more people show up to the same spots? There are other things that tourism destinations can do. The most important thing is that tourism is planned in consultation with residents and people who live there, who are given a voice in the decision making about how tourism is run and managed. That they can say, we welcome tourists up until this point. And they could define a number of things, which if they were to see them and they would happen, they would say,

this has gone too far. There are also places that have done that and decided they want less tourists. And they run what's effectively anti-marketing programs or demarketing programs. Miami Beach releasing a new ad campaign. They are trying to break up with spring breakers. We need to talk. This isn't working anymore. They start to control access in some ways. Just so you know, we're serious.

This March, you can expect things like curfews, bag checks, and restricted beach access. DUI checkpoints, $100 parking... Reduce the number of the transport that's arriving, cut down on the number of holiday rentals. So they've made an active decision to limit the number of tourists and to attract the type of tourists that they feel is most beneficial for them. Now, I can hear your elitist question coming back, Sean, strongly. But we need to balance the needs of tourists and local people.

For all the people at home right now, it's early May, making their travel plans for the summer, maybe that they're late, who are thinking Venice, who are thinking Rome, who are thinking whatever it is, Barcelona, Amsterdam, all these places that might be too crowded. Where would you tell them to go instead? Let's blow up a different spot. Well, I'm going to blow up a completely different spot because over-tourism, big issue thank you for helping strengthen awareness of it other big issues climate change other big issues poverty other big issues loss of nature so there are places that you can travel to that can contribute to jobs and education

in places of real poverty and real need and you have a fantastic time i mean it could be parts of the caribbean it could be costa rica it could be parts of east africa where you can make a huge difference through your trip and if you're going into wild places the fact you are there and paying money to be there can help create the funding and the incentive to protect those forests and those wild areas and that's important because those trees absorb and sequester carbon so if you've decided no more big, you want to have a fabulous time and do some good, then I want to encourage you to go to those wild places, stay in locally owned accommodation, put your money into the hands of people who desperately need it to send their kids to school,

and I'm pretty sure you'll have an amazing time. Justin Francis, ResponsibleTravel.com. Amanda Llewellyn produced our show. Matthew Collette edited. Laura Bullard fact-checked. Mr. Rob Byers mixed. But wait, there's more. Abhishek Artsy, Victoria Chamberlain,

Hadi Mawagdi, Halima Shah, Patrick Boyd, Miles Bryan, supervising editor, Amina Alsadi, The Big Boss, Miranda Kennedy, and The King. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder, who's really loving the robots right now. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is part of Vox, which is totally free.

Thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. Join us if you can at vox.com slash give. Thank you. Gucci! Bye.