Hello fellow hoteliers,
We're a small hotel in Amsterdam, operating with a remote front office during nighttime hours. As many of you are aware, in our city, we need to remit city taxes directly to the municipality.
Currently, Booking.com helps us by collecting city taxes without applying any commission and passing them along to us, which is a great help. Unfortunately, we've found that other OTAs, like Expedia, Agoda, and Trip.com, don't offer this feature.
This often leads to guests paying upfront via the OTA and then having to pay city tax upon arrival, which disrupts the guest experience and adds complexity to our operations.
Does anybody have creative ideas on how we can ensure these payments are collected upfront through the OTAs, maybe using something like non-commissioned resort fees or a similar workaround?
Also, any thoughts on how we can push OTAs as an industry to implement this? I realize OTAs are hesitant about offering payment options without commission, but for mandatory payments like city tax, I believe it’s in the best interest of guests to have the payment experience as smooth as possible – and therefore also for OTAs and hoteliers.
I'm foreseeing this topic becoming more and more important in the future.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences!
Thanks,
Axel
