I am currently in Venice. Lucky me. It’s my second time here, the most beautiful city in the world and where my wife and her twin sister were born.
Surely an upscale, upper-upscale or luxury hotel company would hand over a percentage point increase in revenue in order to have a property here. This is the city known as La Serenissima, or “the most serene”; a vital stop on the Grand Tour; the home of the Piazza San Marco, the Grand Canal; the Rialto fish market; gondolas; Harry’s Bar; and thousands of miles of small canal-side streets and the canals themselves.
There are economy hotels on the island of Venice, but overall the city’s average daily rate and revenue per available room numbers seem not to suggest there are.
According to STR Global, the sister company of Hotel News Now, occupancy is low for such a famed destination as this, the year-to-date August number being 68.4%, a rise of 2.2% over the same period in 2014. ADR is €342.65 ($384.23), an increase of 13.2%, while revenue per available room is €234.42 ($262.87), a jump of 15.7%.
During 2014, though, ADR and RevPAR dipped by 3.3% and 5.7%, respectively. Percentage increases in both metrics improved in 2013, but fell in 2012, suggesting the strength of the city’s Venice Biennale festival, which runs from early May to late November but only in odd years. RevPAR in 2014 still clocked in at €202.73 ($227.33).
Those numbers look very healthy, but finding suitable sites probably is a nightmare, as must be securing building permits after any number of art historians, archaeologists and conservationists having nosed their way around glorious buildings and filed their reports.
Then there are the occasional floods, known here as L’acqua Alta, or “the High Water,” that besiege the place when the lagoon tides rise and cover the city with a foot or so of water. The record flood level is just a little below 6 feet, 4 inches. That was recorded in 1996, but in 2012 one tide reached almost 4 feet, 11 inches. And 2014 generally was regarded, over all of its tides, as one of the worst years ever.
I experienced one of these floods on my first visit, and as a tourist I loved it. A pair of Wellington boots sufficed on that day. For locals—there are approximately 64,000 of them, compared with 240,000 tourists per day, on average—floods are a pain, although not so much that they want to give up living amid the beauty that surrounds them.
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| The flood waters are rising in Venice, as evidenced on numerous occasions and in such spots as along the Cannaregio canal (photo: Terence Baker) |
Nor would hoteliers want to up and leave either. It must be a great place to work in hospitality. Adventures outside of the hotels begin the second you leave, and the hotels themselves—legendary names include Gritti Palace; Hotel Danieli; Al Ponte Antico; and Ca’ Sagredo, which sits on the Grand Canal but opened only in 2007, showing, perhaps, it’s still possible to get a foot in the door—often are stunning.
Another blight is the occasional presence of cruise ships, which do not go up the Grand Canal but get close to doing soon and thus dwarf this, lest we forget, sinking city. My opinion is this is tourism at some level of it very ugliest—not so much the notion of cruising itself but the completely unsubtle intrusion into what is a small, delicate place by a floating tub of metal very much larger. I wonder if cruise passengers feel they are in any way trespassing.
By coming by cruise ship, cruise passengers miss one of travel’s most wonderful surprises, the emergence from a train at the Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia to immediately come across the Grand Canal and gaze across it. Or better yet, to take a vaporetto or traghetto taxi boat (much, much less expensive than a gondola) direct from the international airport on the mainland right into the city at the first possible point along the Cannaregio canal to disembark at the Ponte delle Guglie bridge.
They also miss out staying at those grand hotels, where it is possible at all times to imagine the close presence of mysterious, beautiful strangers enveloped in international intrigue and which will hopefully be made safer by an initiative—it was controversial—that begins its work very soon:
MOSE, an Italian acronym for Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico, is a long barrier with gates set up in the lagoon that can be controlled to stop flood waters entering the city.
Maybe it can also keep out those cruise ships, too?
Email Terence Baker or find him on Twitter.
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