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Seeking Advice on OTA City Tax Remittance – Any Experiences?

  • September 16, 2024
  • 5 replies
  • 72 views

  • Senior Apprentice

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

mauritsbots
Superstar Guru
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  • Superstar Guru
  • September 16, 2024

first thought… send a payment request? either manually, or automate it using eg zapier?

 

ow and make this an industry standard? please not.. they will eventually all start charging extra for it, and with margin already so slim.. lets keep payment automation in our own hands


  • Senior Apprentice
  • September 16, 2024
mauritsbots wrote:

first thought… send a payment request? either manually, or automate it using eg zapier?

 

Actually did not think of this yet, I do see some issues on the road here with TA's limiting guests coms through their own platform - but def worthy to look into. Thanks for the suggestion 🙂

mauritsbots wrote:

ow and make this an industry standard? please not.. they will eventually all start charging extra for it, and with margin already so slim.. lets keep payment automation in our own hands

I get your point about OTA's power. I did not mean make it industry standard, I meant TA's giving us the option. In our specific case, what booking.com does - works for us and we wished others offered it too. 


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Payment requests would indeed be a good possibility. At least to give you the option to tackle 50-70% of your arrivals for the extra payment. 
 

Another tip: we have a standardized message in Expedia that right after booking guests are requested to send their contact details to us so we can contact them when needed. This already helps a lot (not 100% but at least 60%). 
 

Good luck and warm greetings from Gouda! 


mauritsbots
Superstar Guru
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  • Superstar Guru
  • September 18, 2024

yes, giving the option would be a nice one - as the OTA's usually stárt making things optional..  ;)


  • Senior Apprentice
  • September 18, 2024
mauritsbots wrote:

yes, giving the option would be a nice one - as the OTA's usually stárt making things optional..  ;)

😜


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