24-hour vaporetto ticket: €25 for the whole ACTV network

What it costs and when it pays off

The 24-hour vaporetto ticket costs €25. ACTV sells it as the Venezia Daily Pass, and it sits second on a ladder of five durations: €9.50 for 75 minutes, €25 for 24 hours, €35 for 48 hours, €45 for 72 hours and €65 for seven days. What you buy is always time on the network, never a distance and never a number of rides.

That makes the arithmetic short. Two rides are still cheaper bought singly; from the third ride of the day the 24-hour ticket takes over, and every ride after it costs nothing extra.

A first day in Venice reaches that mark without trying: line 1 down the Grand Canal from the station in the morning, the boat out to Murano after lunch, the ride back to your hotel in the evening. If instead you plan to walk and take the boat once, the 75-minute ticket is the better buy. Inside those 75 minutes you may change lines and even break the journey and board again. All five durations side by side are on the price overview.

There is a second route to the same €25. Hold a contactless bank card or a phone against the reader every time you board and ACTV charges €9.50 for the first ride, then stops charging once the same card has reached €25 within 24 hours. Best Fare, as the operator calls it, needs a tap at every boarding and works with Mastercard, Visa, V Pay, Maestro, Amex and the usual wallets, but not with PagoBancomat. Up to five people can travel on one card if all five taps happen at the same reader inside a minute. The ceiling matches the ticket price, so this is a question of convenience rather than money, with one catch: a day pass created by tapping covers neither the trains nor the airport.

How the 24 hours are counted

The clock starts at your first validation, not at purchase and not at midnight. A ticket first held against the reader at 14:00 stays valid until 14:00 the next day, so an afternoon arrival gets the rest of that day and the whole of the next morning out of one ticket. Calendar days play no part in it.

Validate at the start of every ride and again at every change of boat or bus, on the white and yellow reader at the landing stage or beside the door. The ticket is not transferable once it has been validated, and a ticket in your pocket that was never held against a reader counts, in a check, as no ticket at all.

Where the ticket takes you

One ticket covers the whole ACTV urban network. On the water that means lines 1 and 2 on the Grand Canal, the circular lines around the old city and the boats to Murano, Burano, Torcello and the Lido, with the network reaching as far as Chioggia Vigo, Punta Sabbioni and Treporti. On land it covers the buses in Mestre and Marghera, the buses on the Lido and on Pellestrina, the tram and the People Mover between Piazzale Roma and Tronchetto. Which line goes where is set out in the line overview, and the run out to the lace island in Venice to Burano.

The 24-hour ticket is also the only duration with a rail component. AVM sells it as an integrated AVM/ACTV and Trenitalia ticket for the regional and regional fast trains inside the municipality of Venice, between Santa Lucia, Porto Marghera, Mestre, Carpenedo and Mestre Ospedale. The 48-hour, 72-hour and seven-day tickets carry nothing of the sort, and neither does a day pass created by tapping a bank card.

The airport stays outside

No timed ACTV ticket is valid for a journey that starts or ends at Marco Polo Airport. The exclusion is written into the tariff itself, and it is the most common surprise for travellers who buy a day ticket before they land.

One bridge exists. Bought together with the day ticket, an Aerobus supplement of €7 one way or €13 return extends it to the ACTV Aerobus line 5 between the airport and Piazzale Roma. It has to be bought at the same moment as the ticket, not added later. Everything else from the airport runs on its own fare: the Alilaguna boats belong to a separate company with a separate ticket, the ATVO express bus and the water taxis each charge their own. The full comparison, with journey times and where to board, is on Marco Polo Airport to Venice; the boat lines are on Alilaguna.

Buying it and collecting it

Booked online, the ticket arrives as a voucher by email with a PNR code printed beneath the QR. In Venice you type that PNR into any Venezia Unica or ACTV machine and the machine prints the travel card; the QR itself is not scanned. Vela, the sales company of the AVM group, runs 110 machines and 25 ticket offices across the city, and the staffed counters at Piazzale Roma and Santa Lucia station will do it for you if the machine queue is long.

The voucher is not tied to a day. Redeem it whenever you are ready, because the 24 hours begin at validation and not before. The booking itself is fixed: a ticket booked online is neither refundable nor changeable, so make sure the number of travellers and the duration are right before you pay. The whole sequence from voucher to reader is on buying vaporetto tickets online.

If you arrive with nothing in hand, the crew on the boats still sell tickets, by card only since 1 July 2024, and a day pass bought on board is handed over already validated. The tram and the People Mover have no on-board sale at all.

Who the day ticket suits

The 24-hour ticket is the right buy in three situations. One full day in the city with three rides or more. A day built around the islands, where the run out to Murano and on to Burano and Torcello is two long rides on its own. And a stopover or a cruise day, where one ticket carries you in from the station, around the city and back out again.

It is the wrong buy as soon as you stay longer. For two full days the 48-hour ticket costs less than two day tickets; for three days the 72-hour ticket beats three, and for travellers between 6 and 29 it drops further with a Rolling Venice card. From four days the seven-day ticket undercuts every other combination. The whole ladder with the break-even for each duration is on vaporetto tickets and passes.

Children travel free until their sixth birthday, so two adults with a five-year-old buy two tickets. From the sixth birthday the adult fare applies; the vaporetto system has no standard child discount. Wheelchair users and holders of the EU Disability Card pay €1.50 per 75 minutes, and the person accompanying a wheelchair user travels free.

The fares, validity and carriage rules on this page follow the official ACTV tariff and conditions of carriage published by AVM, the operator of Venice's public transport, together with the Venezia Unica sales network and the Trenitalia terms for the Venezia Daily Pass.