Consorzio Motoscafi Venezia: our water taxi review

Consorzio Motoscafi Venezia is the largest grouping of water taxi operators in the city: more than a hundred boats linked to a single control room, a call centre staffed around the clock, and a ticket desk in the arrivals hall at Marco Polo airport. Our verdict: it is the most solid choice when you need a boat that genuinely turns up, at any hour and even with a delayed flight, but its online prices sit above the tariff set by the Comune di Venezia — on some routes by a wide margin — and it sells out at peak times. Book early, and know in advance which price base you are paying on.

Who Consorzio Motoscafi Venezia is

It is a consortium trading in its own name: not a company with a fleet of its own, but a grouping of licence holders who sell under a single brand and are dispatched by a central office. Registered office at Castello 4512, VAT number IT02995130271. Registration with the Venice Chamber of Commerce (REA 242220) dates from April 1998, with around twenty employees and share capital of 45,100 euros, according to business-register data reproduced by chamber-of-commerce aggregators.

One detail worth stating plainly: the year the company was founded appears nowhere on its own website, and neither does the number of member firms or licences behind the fleet it advertises. The earliest date anyone can document is still the 1998 chamber registration; whether the consortium existed informally before then is not established by any source you can consult.

The advertised fleet is more than 100 water taxis, working across the whole lagoon and linked by GPS to the control room, which assigns the nearest boat to cut waiting time. Stated maximum capacity: 10 passengers and up to 12 suitcases. Clients the company names include the Biennale, Palazzo Grassi and the Venice Film Festival, alongside group and conference work.

What it offers and what it costs

Private point-to-point transfers, 24 hours a day: Marco Polo airport, Santa Lucia station, Piazzale Roma, the Tronchetto car park, any Venetian hotel, the Lido (Santa Maria Elisabetta and the Excelsior), San Clemente, Molino Stucky, Burano–Mazzorbo and Torcello.

The consortium does not publish a fixed price list: prices only appear inside the booking engine. These are the prepaid amounts we saw at the time of checking, for the base fare of up to 4 passengers and 4 bags.

Surcharges and rules, taken from its own terms: €10 per person from the fifth passenger, €5 per suitcase from the fifth, a night surcharge of €15 from 22:00 to 07:00, and a 5% discount on an airport return trip bought in a single transaction. Payment is by PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Discover. Two practical conditions: flight delays are monitored automatically and do not need to be reported; and at low tide six hotels cannot be reached from their own jetty, so the boat drops you within a five-minute walk of the address.

Two things we did not find, and those absences are themselves a finding. The first is the price of the Grand Canal extension: the FAQ confirm that the route can be lengthened on request to pass Rialto, the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the Salute and the Guggenheim, but they never say whether that detour is free or charged. Ask when you book, and get the answer in writing. The second is the cancellation policy: it is not in the FAQ and there is no page anywhere that contains it — under legal information in the site map you find only company details, privacy and cookies, and no terms of sale. There is a form for requesting a cancellation, but no stated deadlines, penalties or conditions.

If you would rather lock in the price before you travel and have written cancellation terms, the equivalent private transfer can also be booked online.

The consortium’s prices versus the city tariff

This is the most useful part of the review. The service is regulated by the Comune di Venezia, the city council, which sets fares by council resolution: the rates in force are displayed by law at every municipal taxi rank.

Three concrete gaps between the commercial prices and the official ones:

• Night rate. The consortium charges €15 from 22:00 to 07:00; under the Comune di Venezia tariff the surcharge is €10 from 22:00 to 06:00. Both the amount and the time window are different.
• Airport ↔ historic centre. €160 prepaid against the €110 of the official fixed route.
• Piazzale Roma → hotel. €80 online against the €60 of the official fixed route from Ferrovia/Piazzale Roma to San Marco, plus a possible €5 call-out fee away from a rank.

The per-person and per-bag surcharges are higher than the municipal ones too (€5 and €3 on the meter). None of this is illegal: the online product is door to door, with an assigned boat and a locked price, while the official fixed fare applies rank to rank. But the difference is real, it is worth tens of euros a ride, and nobody explains it to you at the point of purchase. All the figures are on our water taxi fares and prices page, and the night surcharges in water taxis at night.

Strengths

• Genuine 24-hour coverage, with a control room that tracks boats by GPS and reassigns them: it is the most reliable way to get a boat at four in the morning.
• Automatic handling of flight delays, with the fallback of a land taxi to Piazzale Roma for flights that slip into the small hours.
• A presence at the airport, with a ticket desk in the arrivals hall: a physical counter is worth a lot when you land tired and the darsena, the boat dock, is a seven-to-ten-minute walk away.
• Clear surcharges: capacity, the cost of each extra passenger and each extra suitcase, the night rate and the return discount are all set out before you pay.

Weaknesses

• Prices above the city tariff on both city and airport routes, with the comparison never spelled out.
• No published price list: to find out a price you have to work your way to the end of the booking engine.
• Cancellation terms are not published, something any online platform puts front and centre.
• Parts of the website do not work: the “excursions” page listed in the site map redirects to the home page, and nothing replaces it.
• Availability at peak times: it is not unusual to find it fully booked a few days out in high season.

What travellers say

On Tripadvisor the consortium scores 4.1 out of 5 from 567 reviews, ranking fourteenth among 221 transport businesses in Venice: a sample big enough to mean something. The recurring positives are punctuality (drivers arriving early), proactive rebooking after a flight delay, clear instructions for finding the boat, and no surprise charges. One reviewer who paid €160 for two people with four bags sums it up: “No hidden costs. Fast and efficient.”

The criticisms are two, and both are specific. The first is availability: the same reviewer describes finding the consortium fully booked for a peak-season arrival when she tried to reserve two days ahead. The second is an inconsistent fleet, which fits the consortium model: one traveller describes the outbound boat as elderly and barely maintained, and the return boat as excellent. There are also reports of uncommunicative staff at the airport jetty, and of a walkway to the boats that is on the upper level and not obvious to find.

On the Rick Steves forum, this is the operator the community points people to most consistently. In the thread about private water taxi recommendations, one contributor calls it “the official water taxi company” and says she would hesitate to book with anyone else; in another discussion it is named as the alternative to use after a bad experience with an online reseller. Two caveats, though: that description is inaccurate — there is no official operator, only the city council that regulates the trade — and the prices quoted in that thread (€115–140 for the airport, €65 from Piazzale Roma) are lower than what the booking engine shows now. There is also a claim doing the rounds that the consortium is recommended in Rick Steves’ pocket guide to Venice. It comes from a single Tripadvisor review and does not stand up: on Rick Steves’ editorial pages the consortium’s name appears only in forum posts by users, never in any staff-written content. We are not treating it as fact.

When to choose it, and the alternatives

Choose Consorzio Motoscafi when the timing is awkward, the group is large or you have a lot of luggage, and when you want one point of contact who will handle the flight delay for you. It is also the sensible pick for night transfers, despite the higher surcharge, because after dark being able to get a boat at all matters more than the price.

Look elsewhere in three cases. If you are comparing prices, our Venezia Taxi review covers a rival consortium that charges less on the airport run. If you are travelling alone or as a pair and the budget rules, the shared water taxi supplied by Bucintoro Viaggi starts at around forty euros a head, and the Alilaguna scheduled boat at €18. If you need a written, flexible cancellation policy, the booking platforms state theirs explicitly. To choose a booking channel, start with how to book a water taxi and from the airport to Venice.

In short: Consorzio Motoscafi Venezia is the operator to count on when reliability is worth more than twenty or forty euros, as long as you book early and understand that its price list is not the same thing as the city tariff.