Alex Hai: Venice's Most Contested Gondolier

Most people who search Alex Hai, or Alexandra Hai, are looking for a ride with the gondolier who took on the Venice licensing system. The honest answer first: there is nothing we can verify as bookable under this name. The former official website, alexhaigondolatours.com, returned a 404 when we checked it in September 2026, no partner platform in our data carries the name, and there is no stand where you can queue and ask for the boat. What remains is a story worth getting right, because most retellings mix up three separate things.

Prices checked September 2026.

What is verifiable

Hai was born in Hamburg in 1967, of German and Algerian descent, and began as an apprentice gondolier in 1996 on the traghetto — the two-oar ferry gondola that crosses the Grand Canal. The licensing attempts followed, and failed twice: the written exam for substitute gondolier in 1997, then the rowing test in 1999. That 1999 result was annulled on the grounds that the examining commission had been composed entirely of men, contrary to Italian equal-opportunity law. The retake produced a lower score than the first attempt.

The city and the trade never issued a licence. Instead Hai worked outside the public-service system as a gondoliere de casada — a house gondolier, the arrangement by which patrician families once kept their own boat and their own rower, revived here for hotel guests and selected private clients. In July 2005 Hai launched a personal gondola named Pegaso, restored by the Giudecca boatbuilder Gianfranco “Crea” Vianello, with a reproduction antique ferro on the prow.

In December 2015 a court in Rome recognised Hai as the first female gondolier to operate in Venice — the formal end of a dispute that had run for years. The reporting is specific about which court and how long: the Corriere del Veneto piece of 29 December 2015 cited in Hai’s Wikipedia entry is headlined around the Consiglio di Stato, Italy’s highest administrative court, confirming the earlier ruling after eight years. We could not open the judgment itself, so that chain — press report, then encyclopedia citation — is as close to the primary document as this page gets. Hai came out as transgender in 2017 and has since been described as Italy’s first openly transgender gondolier. Published sources use he and him, and this page follows them.

Three stories that get mixed together

The distinction is not pedantry, it is the whole dispute. Venice licences gondoliers as operators of a public non-scheduled water service: the licence is personal, capped in number by the Comune, and requires the holder to row the service in person. A hotel rowing its own guests in its own boat sits in a different legal box, which is exactly why the arrangement survived while the licence applications did not.

Why the fight mattered to gondoliers

Two figures inside the trade said publicly at the time that Hai had been treated unfairly: the director of the Ente Gondola office — the municipal institution wound up in 2016 — who pointed out that Venetian women had rowed gondolas during the war, and a former president of the gondoliers’ association, who said part of the examining commission had obstructed the candidate and that the licence should be granted. The opposition was not unanimous, and the case is still the reference point when anyone asks why a trade of roughly 400 licence holders took until 2010 to admit a woman on paper.

What a traveller should do now

If you came here to book, treat the name as a piece of history rather than an operator, and be careful with pages that still sell it. A search for it turns up aggregator listings and affiliate pages that describe a gondola ride in general terms and then hand you off to a large booking platform. That is not fraud, but it is not Hai’s boat either.

The nearest thing to what people imagine when they read the story — one boat, a rower who picks the quiet canals, no shared bench with strangers — is a private ride you can book with a price in writing:

Or skip the platforms: walk to a stand and pay the official tariff set by the Comune di Venezia, €90 per boat for 30 minutes by day, €110 for 35 minutes after 19:00, up to five passengers. For four or five people that beats any online private ride, and you can ask the gondolier for the small canals rather than the Grand Canal parade. Our where to board page says which stands start in quiet water; private gondola rides covers the booked alternative in full.

Verdict

As an operator review this page has to end with a blank: nothing published, nothing bookable, no price to quote. As a story it is the most useful one in Venice’s gondola trade, because it shows exactly where the licence line runs — and that a court can recognise you as a gondolier while the register never does. If you want to see the craft that sits at the centre of it, the walk to the Squero di San Trovaso costs nothing, and a booked private ride gives you the quiet canals without the paperwork.