Italy banning large cruise ships from Venetian Harbor

This is really great news.

While I agree this is good news, to play devil's advocate I'm curious how this will affect the local people and business's? That's a lot of money turned away and a huge portion of those island's economy is tourism based.

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A ton of people still visit Venice via other means of transportation.

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Well certainly. I've never taken a cruise in my life fwiw and I've been to Venice.

But still one cruise ship is 1,000s of people. I don't have a clue how often the stop in there. Maybe the city has a plan to make up some of that?

ETA; I remember part of the problem was that most of the cruisers didn't stay in hotels or do other things that the regular tourists did. So while they brought money in, it wasn't nearly as much as the visitors of other methods.

Yeah, Venice desperately needs less tourism. It needs to be a real city, not some kind of Disbeyland-on-water museum.

Its really never going to be a "real" city again, but during the day the place is a fricking zoo and you can't get anywhere, let alone buy anything. At night it is lovely.

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Yeah, Venice desperately needs less tourism. It needs to be a real city, not some kind of Disbeyland-on-water museum.

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See, this is the exact ignorance people say all the time and my exact point. What is your suggestion to make up for it?

Its a city on an island in the middle of a lagoon, normal business is not profitable there. The logistics have already failed over and over, that's why everyone that doesn't work in tourism basically has already left the city. So you can't just take away a major source of tourism and expect something to fill the gap.

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And it won't do the environmental damage the cruise ships were doing.

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Absolutely agree with this

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There's a balance between no tourism and what Venice has morphed into with the cruise ships.

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Sure, but again that was likely a major source of the tourists. Its not easy to take something major away and replace that void.

I haven't paid attention to this so I don't know all the details. Knowing the Italians, they don't care and are happy to have no tourists and less money. But I was talking in regards to other tourism in the city, if there's not enough business to support the current businesses, that city could fall apart with a quickness.

So a quick read online is saying they are just moving them to Marghera, which looking at the map is just the mainland basically where the train comes in. So this may not have much of an impact on the cruises afterall? They would likely just stop in the mainland and then take smaller ferries or the train into Venice.

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Mass, low-dollar tourism needs to be replaced with higher-dollar, lower volume tourism at key sites all over Italy.

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I was about to post something and I see you said the quiet part out loud for sake of discussion.

"Over" tourism has been much discussed before COVID. For example, more strict limitations on who/when can climb Macchu Picchu. Dubrovnik has also contemplated limiting cruise ships.

I have mixed feelings about it, because I think it would be kind of shitty that only people with money can enjoy the world's greatest treasures.

It doesn't help that the type of people who promote these kind of things tend to be very elitist and unpleasant, talking out both sides of their mouth about caring for the common man but making the world a more expensive place to get by in.

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I have mixed feelings about it, because I think it would be kind of shitty that only people with money can enjoy the world's greatest treasures.

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Timed entry tickets to things like the Louvre and limiting overall number of visitors per day aren't necessarily reducing access to the rich: they ensure a decent visitor experience for everyone, regardless of the price paid. Smaller museums have done this for years (like the Galleria Borghese in Rome)....but the bigger ones use mass entry as a cash cow.

A museum can easily reserve a certain number of daily tickets for walk-up guests who arrive by a certain time, or have a daily lottery for last minute tickets, or offer free entry on certain days (like last Sunday of month for Vatican museums).