To Deter Day-Trippers, Venice Tested a €5 Entrance Fee. Did Visitors Stay Away?

When Venice introduced a five euro entrance fee in April, officials said the aim was to dissuade day-trippers from visiting at peak times, in a bid to ease the pressure on beleaguered residents forced to share the fragile city’s limited space and public resources.

So did the fee work?

“We are convinced that we limited some peaks,” said Luigi Brugnaro, Venice’s mayor, who called the experiment a “great success.”

But at a news conference on Friday, city officials conceded that a more thorough analysis of the data was necessary before it could definitively be said that the objective had been realized in this test phase.

City officials had singled out 29 peak dates from April through the middle of this month — mostly national holidays and weekends — when single-day travelers arriving in Venice between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. were required to pay the €5 fee (about $5.50).

Over the course of the period, the entrance fee was paid 485,000 times, making the city €2.43 million richer, according to statistics presented.

“Much more than we expected,” Mr. Brugnaro said, adding that it had been estimated that the city would collect about €700,000.