Water taxis at night: late arrivals and dawn departures

Three clocks for the same night

For water taxis, “night” doesn’t start and end at one time. It depends on whose price list you’re paying.

The rule of thumb is this. If you take a taxi from an official city rank and pay by the tariff, the city’s hours apply. If you book a transfer at a commercial price with a consortium, its terms apply. The result is a grey zone between 6:00 and 7:00: for the city it’s already day, for the consortia it’s still night.

Anyone with an early-morning flight notices straight away. Leaving your hotel at 6:15 means no night surcharge at the city fare, but you do pay it if you’ve booked with Consorzio Motoscafi or Venezia Taxi.

What a night trip costs: the sums

The first four rows are city-tariff arithmetic: the base fare plus surcharges, as shown on the official fare sheet. They are not quotes from an operator.

At the reduced rate for residents and passengers with disabilities, the last trip comes down to €40: €12 + €16 + €4 + €8.

The next rows, by contrast, are commercial prices, worked out from the daytime fares the consortia showed in their booking systems plus their own night surcharge.

The GetYourGuide price is the one shown at the time of checking. According to the product listing, the night surcharge isn’t included and is added separately: before you pay, check the summary or ask the supplier for the amount. Every other item on the price list is explained in our guide to water-taxi prices.

Landing at Marco Polo after 23:00

The taxi dock is a 7–10 minute walk from arrivals, along a covered walkway. In the evening the problem isn’t the walk, but which services are still running when you come out of baggage reclaim.

Alilaguna: check the season’s timetable

On Alilaguna’s official summer timetable, the Blue Line leaves the airport until 00:20 and the Orange Line, the one that runs up the Grand Canal, until 23:05. The summer timetable runs until the end of October; for the winter period, check the timetable Alilaguna publishes before you travel. The Blue Line stops a lot: it takes about 75–85 minutes to San Marco, closer to 75 on evening runs. The €18 ticket covers one piece of hand luggage and one suitcase whose three dimensions add up to no more than 160 cm, free of charge.

Bus plus taxi: the land route

The ATVO bus covers the airport–Piazzale Roma run in about 20 minutes. On the timetable in force at the time of checking, after 23:50 there are still two departures, at 00:20 and 1:10. The ticket costs €12, luggage included.

A road taxi does the same trip at a fixed fare: €40 per car, with all surcharges already included, even at night. The fixed fare applies to taxis taken from the rank, not to those booked by phone: ask for it explicitly before you set off, as the Comune advises. The Radio Taxi Venezia dispatch line answers 24 hours a day on +39 041 5964.

Beyond Piazzale Roma, cars can’t go any further. You can carry on on foot, or take a water taxi from the city rank at Piazzale Roma: at the city fare, with the night surcharge, Rialto costs €60 and San Marco €70. Add bus and water taxi together for two people to San Marco and you reach €94, against €120 for the direct trip. You save a little, but you change vehicles with your luggage in the middle of the night.

A booked taxi when your flight is late

Consorzio Motoscafi says it tracks flight delays automatically, with no need to let it know. There’s an important clause, though: if your landing slips to between midnight and 7:00, the first leg to Piazzale Roma may be done by road taxi, and you only board the boat there. If your flight is due in late in the evening, bear it in mind.

The shared water taxi from the airport has no fixed departures, only service windows, and the supplier’s own information (Bucintoro Viaggi) doesn’t add up: on its Venicelink website, arrivals are served until 22:30, with €6 extra after 20:00; on Tiqets the service is listed until midnight, with a night rate from 20:00. On GetYourGuide the shared transfer has a separate night option: check the latest bookable time before you count on it for a flight landing after 22:00.

There’s also the car-plus-boat option: a driver meets you in arrivals, takes you to Piazzale Roma, and a private boat covers the rest of the way to your hotel. On GetYourGuide it costs €130 per group; the maximum number of passengers and the available times are on the product listing before you pay. Every variant is in our guides to the water taxi from the airport and to road taxis, Mestre and Treviso.

Leaving at dawn: flights before 8:00

For an early-morning flight, work backwards. A private water taxi takes 30–40 minutes to the airport, then it’s another 7–10 minutes’ walk from the pier to the terminal, and finally there’s the time for security.

The options, cheapest first:

• ATVO bus from Piazzale Roma. The first bus to the airport leaves at 4:20, on the timetable in force at the time of checking. About 20 minutes, €12. It works if you can walk to Piazzale Roma.
• Alilaguna. On the official summer timetable the first Blue Line boat leaves San Marco Giardinetti at 3:46 and reaches the airport at 5:10, with the next one an hour later; the first Orange Line boat leaves Rialto at 6:31 and arrives at 7:26. In winter, check the current timetable.
• Shared water taxi to the airport. The trip takes about 40 minutes, with departures from fixed points such as Piazzale Roma, San Marco, Santa Maria Elisabetta on the Lido and San Zaccaria; €39 per person. According to the product listing, pick-up is set about 3 hours before your flight. On its own Venicelink website the supplier, Bucintoro Viaggi, gives departures from 4:00, with €6 extra for early-morning ones. On Tiqets the equivalent product costs €39 per person; the listing gives a service from 4:00 to midnight (no runs between 23:45 and 4:00) and a night rate in the early morning and evening, without stating the amount.
• Private water taxi. From your hotel door to the airport pier. Remember the 6:00–7:00 window: no night surcharge at the city fare, the full night surcharge with the consortia. On GetYourGuide there’s also a private motorboat to the airport at €200 per boat, but it has only 2 reviews: it’s a new product, still to be proven.

Two people leaving their hotel at 5:30 with Consorzio Motoscafi pay €160 + €15 = €175, or €87.50 each. By shared taxi they’d spend €78 in total. With four of you, the private boat booked direct drops to €43.75 each. The full departure plan is in our guide to getting to the airport.

Fog, tides and water doors at night

At night, small hitches matter more, because you have fewer alternatives.

Tides. Water taxis depend on the tide, which can affect pick-up times and where you’re dropped off. At high water, the bridges over the inner canals may be too low to pass under; at low tide, some canals are too shallow. The driver then falls back on the nearest reachable landing, normally no more than five minutes’ walk away. Consorzio Motoscafi lists six hotels that sometimes can’t be reached at low tide. At night you’ll walk those five minutes in the dark, with your luggage: plan for it.

Water doors. If your hotel has a water entrance, ask in writing whether it’s usable at any tide and whether someone will open it at night. If the answer is vague, ask to be dropped at the land entrance.

Fog. Fog can change your mode of transport, not just your timing. According to the listing for the GetYourGuide shared transfer from the airport, in fog or bad weather the boat is replaced by a car to Piazzale Roma. For a morning flight in the foggy season, leave with a wider margin. All the details on suitcases, tides and accessibility are in our guide to luggage and accessibility.

Getting around the city late in the evening

After dinner, if you want to get back to your hotel without walking, you have two options on the water.

Metered water taxi. You can go to an official city taxi rank or phone a consortium directly, for example the 24-hour Consorzio Motoscafi call centre. The Comune also lists the number 199 48 49 50 for taxis, without saying who answers. If you’re picked up away from a rank you pay a €5 call-out fee. As shown above, a 10-minute ride at 23:00 with a call-out comes to €50 at the city fare.

Vaporetto. After the last evening runs of the daytime lines, ACTV keeps a night waterbus service going, line N: the route and times are in the official ACTV timetable, so check before you go out. The 75-minute ticket costs €9.50 per person.

If your restaurant is on an island, Murano or Burano for instance, the meter doesn’t apply: the fixed routes do, €60 from Murano and €115 from Burano to the historic centre, plus €10 night surcharge. For the islands, see our page on Murano and Burano by water taxi. If you want a boat to yourselves, everything is in our guide to the private water taxi.