| For me, Venice is too far gone to change without significant pain to the local economy. The point of pricing isn't to completely eliminate tourism, it's to lower it. The goal is to find a price point that cuts down, but doesn't eliminate tourism. And while it would attract a higher wealth tourist, you can easily adjust the system to a lottery type where you have a certain percent of people who just buy access and others who won a lottery. They do this out west for river access during the summer. They don't want a whole bunch of people river rafting and destroying the river, so they have a lottery that you have to buy a ticket for. You lose the money if you don't win a license. This creates revenue without increasing the number of tourists. And it also creates a system where people who really want to go there, will buy a ticket without a guarantee of a spot. And,when they do go, they tend to be much better quality tourists since. I know people who have been buying tickets for almost a decade and haven't gotten a spot. Something like this is very effective at keeping up revenue and decreasing the number of tourists. |
“Make poor people poorer”.
The price increases won’t impact the wealthy, even if they did have to reduce their travel by 10-20%. But it will impact those that save (or pay-off) for years for their dream trip or honeymoon trip.
My preferred approach would be more progressive than regressive: just make rich people poorer through income/capital/dividend taxes.