The Rick Steves Forum as a Source on Venice Water Taxis

The Rick Steves forum is the source we cite most often when the subject is the reputation of Venetian operators, and it is worth explaining why — and where it stops being reliable. The verdict: it is excellent for working out who people had a good experience with and what went wrong, because it sells nothing and bans promotion; it is useless as a source of fares, because the posts are anecdotes, often years old and sometimes in dollars. Use it for the people and the procedures, not for the numbers.

What it is

It is the readers’ forum of Rick Steves’ Europe, Inc., the American guidebook, television and tour company founded by the writer and presenter Rick Steves, based in Edmonds, Washington.

It runs to more than fifty boards divided by country and region — Italy, France, Spain, Europe in general — and by topic: packing, transport, food, tourist scams, money-saving strategies, trip reports. There are also hotel and restaurant review boards for the main destinations. Reading is free; posting requires registration.

How it is moderated, and why that matters

The forum is run directly by the company, has published guidelines and a report link on every post; moderators watch the boards and can sanction or ban. Travel consultants and moderators carry a badge that distinguishes them from ordinary members.

The rule that makes everything else useful is the outright ban on commercial content:

“proposing transactions or promoting your own website… is prohibited” — Rick Steves, Community Guidelines

Also banned are fake reviews, impersonation, invasions of privacy, trolling and — a rule you wouldn’t take for granted — posts written by bots or artificial intelligence. The one exception is that hotels and restaurants may post a single short reply to a review. Politics, too, is to be firmly avoided, by explicit instruction in the rules.

The practical upshot is that, unlike a review platform open to anyone, there is no financial incentive to post here: nobody earns a commission by steering you towards an operator.

What it is reliable on, and what it isn’t

It is a discussion board, not a booking channel, and it belongs to a company that sells guidebooks and tours: so it is not disinterested about organised travel in general. But it has no financial stake in Venetian water taxi operators and takes no advertising, which makes it unusually clean on precisely our subject.

The visible posters are mostly independent North American travellers, experienced and budget-conscious, with a post history you can look up: you can see whether the person writing is a one-off or someone who has been posting for years. On concrete logistics — where the desk is, how far you walk, how long you wait, what happens if the flight is late — that makes them more reliable than anonymous reviews.

The limits are just as clear. The information is anecdotal; the prices quoted are often old and in foreign currency; and the forum has no authority whatsoever over Italian licences and fares. For those there are the Comune di Venezia, Marco Polo airport and AVM: see our page on fares and prices.

The threads that matter on water taxis

The general tenor of the Venice discussions is captured by one recurring question: is it worth it? The community’s answer is yes, if you have suitcases, a group to split the cost with, an awkwardly placed hotel, or it’s your first arrival; otherwise Alilaguna or the vaporetto. One representative thread drew sixteen replies, almost all in favour of the taxi, on the grounds of luggage handling, the door-to-door arrival and the sheer experience of entering the city that way.

Consorzio Motoscafi is the operator the community points to most consistently. In a discussion dedicated to private water taxi recommendations, one poster calls it, in her own words, the official water taxi company and says she would hesitate to book with anyone else. One point needs correcting: there is no official company, the licences are held by individual owners and the city council sets the fares. The signal still stands, though, confirmed by two other members who describe repeat bookings and no problems. A useful clarification, because the confusion is widespread: that recommendation comes from members, not from the editorial team. On Rick Steves’ own editorial pages the consortium does not appear, and the claim that it is named in the Venice pocket guide comes from a review on a travel website, not from anything found in the text of the guide.

Towards online resellers the attitude is the opposite. In a thread comparing two intermediaries, members explain that the second resells the first’s products with a mark-up, and one of them sums it up in four words:

“Viator is a reseller” — LIZinPA, Rick Steves Travel Forum

In the same thread another member describes a prepaid private transfer that never turned up and a reply obtained only after disputing the charge with the card issuer; as an alternative he recommends Consorzio Motoscafi. In a third, older thread a member had already linked the reselling site to the scheduled boat company — a hunch that corporate filings later confirmed. Our reviews of Consorzio Motoscafi, Venice Link and Viator start partly from here.

One trap to know about: a thread titled “Consorzio Motoscafi” looks promising but never received a single reply before being closed automatically. A discussion’s title tells you nothing about how much is inside it.

The forum is useful on ticketing infrastructure too. In a discussion with a telling title, a member describes a €40 transport pass whose QR code wouldn’t work, staff who suggested he duck under the barriers instead of fixing the problem, and no answer to his follow-ups; in the replies the community generally advises against that option. It is the same kind of failure we find in reviews of vouchers sold by resellers.

The prices quoted in the threads, and why they aren’t fares

These are the figures circulating in the Venice discussions: €115–140 airport→hotel and €65 Piazzale Roma→hotel in a thread about operator recommendations; around €60 for four people with luggage from the station to their hotel; €35–40 per person, minimum two, for shared water taxis; and, in the “is it worth it” thread, a private taxi at €115–125 against Alilaguna costed at €75.

That last comparison is worth pausing on, because it is the most misread. The €75 for Alilaguna is not per person: it is the total for the group, a family of five who would have got off the Blue line at the second stop. And the €125 for the taxi is for those same five people, with the supplement for exceeding four passengers already included. Read that way the comparison changes character: it isn’t €75 against €125 each, it is fifty euros of difference across a whole group. This is exactly the kind of detail a forum anecdote leaves unstated, and that anyone copying the figure carries away wrong.

None of these is a fare. They are amounts paid by individual travellers, at different times, on routes we don’t know in detail. Compare them with the current prices of the products below and with the council’s tariff before relying on them.

Strengths

• No commercial incentive: no advertising, no affiliate links, promotion banned by the rules.
• Real moderation, with published guidelines and an explicit ban on fake reviews and automatically generated text.
• Traceable members, with a searchable post history: you can weigh up who is writing.
• Excellent on the “how”: docks, desks, waits, how operators behave when a flight is delayed.
• Consistency over time: on Venetian operators the community’s view is stable and verifiable across several discussions.

Weaknesses

• Dated prices, often in dollars, mixed in with official fares without distinction.
• No authority over Italian licences, obligations or fares.
• A sample skewed towards independent North American travellers: not very representative of people arriving in groups or out of season.
• Misleading titles: promising threads that turn out to be empty, and closed discussions that keep ranking in search engines.
• It belongs to a company that sells travel, so it isn’t neutral about organised tours in the broad sense.

How to use it without going wrong

Three rules. Check the date on every post before trusting a figure. Separate fact from opinion: “the desk is on the first floor opposite the travelator” is verifiable, “€110 is a rip-off” isn’t. Always cross-check against a primary source — the Comune di Venezia tariff, the airport’s website, the operator’s own booking engine.

The community’s practical verdict on the operators we cover is, all things considered, in line with ours: book direct with a consortium, treat online resellers with caution when paying in advance, and remember that anyone rebadging someone else’s product adds a mark-up on top. For the step-by-step procedure see how to book; for the other popular source we have examined, our review of venice-information.com.