Industria hotelera busca eliminar impuesto de alojamiento(3%)

The Journal

BUSINESS & ECONOMY
Hotel industry lobbies to lift lodging tax, add charge to plane tickets

(Infocom) — The country’s hotel industry, through the Costa Rican Chamber of Hotels (CCH), has expressed its support for a bill aimed at lifting the 3 percent lodging tax that currently exists.

“In the opinion of the Costa Rican Chamber of Hotels, Bill No. 16.752 is of great importance for this sector of the tourism industry,” CCH President Carlos Lachner said.

The bill, known as “Law for Strengthening the Development of the National Tourism Industry,” calls for eliminating the 3 percent tax currently tack on customers’ hotel bills, which was created through Law No. 2.706 of Dec. 2, 1960. The bill would also create a $15 entry tax applied to each person entering the country by air (added to the total cost of each plane ticket) and would reform article 46 of the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT) Law, No. 1.917, of July 29, 1959.

The idea behind the bill is that $15 entry tax would substitute the 3 percent lodging tax.

“The (lodging) tax has not been easy to control or audit because it’s collected all throughout the country, and recovery of those monies has not been as good as expected,” Lachner explained. “Meanwhile, by charging the tax to airplane tickets, its collection would be simplified because of the reduced number of agents who would be collecting the tax. In this way, all tourists who visit the country from abroad via airports, whether or not they stay in hotels here, would pay the tax, thus generating an easy way to charge and better controls.”

Lachner said that CCH has been insisting for several years on the elimination of the 3 percent lodging tax because it has put the burden of collecting it on only one sector of the tourism economy. The new bill, he claimed, has the virtue or not just lifting the tax, but creating another way to substitute it.

Overall, the bill seeks to update the old sources of financing for ICT, adapting them to the tourism activity’s new needs and making sure that such funds are invested specifically in promoting Costa Rica’s No. 1 industry.

As the proposal indicates, the funds collected by the new $15 airplane ticket tax would be used for promotion, marketing and planning of the country’s tourism industry as well as the sustainable development of the country as a tourist destination. Only those who buy their tickets abroad will pay this tax.

Collection of the tax would be done at the moment a visitor buys his or her ticket, thus fulfilling the bill’s premise that the tax would be charged to all people who enter the country by air, regardless of where they will be staying. Moreover, the funds generated by this entry tax won’t be subjected to a budget cap or trimming by the government, as stipulated in articles 2 and 3 of the proposed bill.

The bill also includes a reform whose objective is to deal with the growing phenomenon of people acquiring plane tickets abroad, typically in other Central American countries, to avoid the current $5 local ticket issuing tax.