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At risk of being labeled a "neoliberal idealist," why isn't the answer here simply taxing tourists more? Pigovian taxes have been a thing for fifty years, yet

At risk of being labeled a "neoliberal idealist," why isn't the answer here simply taxing tourists more? Pigovian taxes have been a thing for fifty years, yet they are still seldom used. It seems like such an obvious solution to me that the fact it's not used more often (ex: towns banning airbnb vs taxing it) suggests to me that I'm missing something obvious.

wild_preference 8y ago
Maybe you push out the profitable tourist and leave the sort of stinky dreadlocked backpacker who changes his baby's diaper on the airport gate kiosk and makes their destination a worse place than when they arrived.
frio 8y ago
Yeah, this is roughly where my thoughts lie. When my partner and I were travelling around Europe, many of the popular cities charged a bed tax — usually only a euro or two a night, so not enough to put us off in anyway, but in aggregate allowing the cities to invest in facilities that could support the tourist influx. Back home, there’s been debate about doing this too. I hope the pro-tax side wins. Our country is suffering under the annual tourist load, and we need more money in the pot to support it — at the basic end of the spectrum, there are lots of popular places that desperately need toilets and rubbish facilities for the tourists (and the locals) to use. Private industry cannot fill that gap (or, so far, has not) — and while the public are profiting from the visitors, more of that profit needs to be diverted to public coffers to enable the government to fix the problem. A bed tax is a great tool for helping that to happen.
- pj_mukh 8y ago
  "usually only a euro or two a night, so not enough to put us off in anyway, but in aggregate allowing the cities to invest in facilities that could support the tourist influx." This is exactly the right strategy! And the "infrastructure to support more tourists" is exactly what this article lays out.
  - buboard 8y ago
    but if it's not enough to put them off, the tax doesn't work
    - pj_mukh 8y ago
      The idea isn't to put them off, that seems like a mindlessly cynical goal. Build the infrastructure to support the larger numbers. If the infrastructure needs to discriminate against tourists, that's fine too (e.g. added trains for tourists vs. commuters), new digital methods tool can allow for this.
      - akvadrako 8y ago
        No, the idea is to put them off. It's basically impossible to "build infrastructure" to support them, whatever that means. There is no more room for trains or even sidewalks, so it would mean totally changing the cities into something else.
        pj_mukh 8y ago
        Yes. Cities change. All the time. Why is this suddenly a problem? New train/subway lines are built (even in SF! [1]), sidewalks are widened (car lanes can be collapsed). None of this is new, in fact, this kind of growth and change has been the standard in the last 100 years of urban development. This doesn't stop now. [1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/15/18096775/bart-second-crossing-transbay-tube-bay-sf-transit https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/15/18096775/bart-second-crossi...
        akvadrako 8y ago
        It's obvious why this is a problem. Just look at Venice - when a city is mostly filled with tourists it becomes like a theme park. Are you serious about building subways and widening sidewalks there? I suppose you'll say everybody should just move out if they don't like it, but most people consider it the better option to plan how their cities evolve.
- kaffee 8y ago
  Check out Chicago or Montreal. The tourist tax is just massive.
  - sologoub 8y ago
    Montreal looks to be only 3.5% extra, not exactly massive. Their sales and goods/services taxes are high, which works out to close to 20% total tax on a room. Still not that crazy. Source: https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g155032-i51-k6671607-How_much_are_hotel_taxes-Montreal_Quebec.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g155032-i51-k6671607-H...
    - kaffee 8y ago
      I think YUL has some of the highest airport fees for any major North American city. For example, there's an "Airport Improvement Fee" of 30 CAD (on every flight) https://www.aircanada.com/us/en/aco/home/legal/surcharges.html https://www.aircanada.com/us/en/aco/home/legal/surcharges.ht... My sense is that this is just one of many fees that hit you when you fly into Montréal. I think the total fees are more like 60-90 USD on every flight. (I'm not suggesting that high taxes are bad. I support aggressively high VAT taxes refunded to the poor and lower middle class.)
      - eigenvector 8y ago
        All Canadian airports have high AIFs (Toronto's is $25 for instance), and they are charged to everyone not just tourists. It's more to do with how airports are structured and managed in Canada versus other countries. It's a user-pay model rather than having them subsidized by the government. In fact many actually pay ground rent to the federal government.
        volkl48 8y ago
        It's arguably not a model that has actually worked out very well for Canada. They push a significant portion of their air travelers over the US border for much cheaper flights. And they wind up with fewer flights and worse route options to their own domestic airports as a result. Ex: Burlington VT is about 40% Canadian, Plattsbugh + Niagara Falls NY are almost entirely Canadian traffic.
dgzl 8y ago
How would you differentiate a local vs. a tourist? Edit: is that even legal?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- longerthoughts 8y ago
  In the US cities use things like hotel tax to target areas skewed towards tourist spending.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  It's typically a tax on accommodation, rather than anything else.
  - dgzl 8y ago
    That's what I thought. Unfortunately that also affects locals, which diminishes the benefit.
    - thenanyu 8y ago
      Locals who stay at hotels? Usually these taxes are only on short term accommodations like hotels and Airbnb
      - maccard 8y ago
        They're also usually limited by duration. So it'll be x euro a night for the first 7 nights, with a max of Y per stay
      - dgzl 8y ago
        Yes, if the destination is say a city, then those who live even just an hour away want to come and stay sometimes. Same is true for beaches and lakes, near ski resorts, ect.
bobthepanda 8y ago
Part of it is also restricting location. Every large city has a tourist quarter that becomes devoid of everyday services for residents in favor of trinket shops and expensive, mediocre restaurants (e.g. Times Square in NYC). By introducing AirBnBs everywhere you run the risk of turning residential quarters into these dead zones. In contrast, hotels are very easy to restrict using zoning.
- ip26 8y ago
  The promise of Airbnb (I'm not a booster though) is that if you spread out the impact, you don't have to have any dead zones.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    Except it doesn't work. People buy out apartments simply to AirBnB them, meaning one less local can live there. Others get driven out due to noise, and then yet another AirBnB company comes in an snatches them up. AirBnB is a huge issue that nobody seems willing to face, imo.
the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
> At risk of being labeled a "neoliberal idealist," why isn't the answer here simply taxing tourists more? Because that's really tricky to do without reducing the town to just tourism. Some people forget that in tourist towns there are also people who live, who have families and friends and some of their activities look very much like tourism. Sure, you can try to do all kinds of things to work around this but ultimately the solution of taxing tourists does not work well in practice.
- elbasti 8y ago
  Quite the opposite. If the worry is "too much tourists" well, just raise the tax until you have the desire amount of tourists! (and a lot more money in the coffers). What am I missing here? As an example, the country of Bhutan has zero desire for tourists, but instead of banning them they just charge a $250USD tax per day.
  - selectodude 8y ago
    >but instead of banning them they just charge a $250USD tax per day. Hard to call that a tax when it includes lodging, a personal guide, a driver with car, food, and entrance fees to the things you go see. All you have to cover while there is tips and alcohol.
- linkregister 8y ago
  > ultimately the solution of taxing tourists does not work well in practice. Got any examples? Many cities in the world have tourism taxes, charged as a per-night fee added to hotel bills. Miami has a beach fee for tourists. Somehow, despite no income tax, Miami manages to stay solvent.
  - andrewflnr 8y ago
    I don't think Miami is worried about becoming reduced to just tourism (aren't they already?), so it's not really a counterexample to GP's point. Ed: explicitness
no_wizard 8y ago
In the USA I think the general populace is tax averse. Passing a new tax even one that could arguably be good for the local population or region, is a good way to get unelected, even in very liberal states. Local governments are incredibly susceptible to this, but it very clearly plays out nationally as well. The idea that government can “do good” in the USA is very co troversial at best. This is a great article about it, as a simple litmus https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/economy/slipping-behind-because-of-an-aversion-to-taxes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/economy/slipping...
- closeparen 8y ago
  This is why hotel taxes are popular. Voters don’t pay them.
forrestthewoods 8y ago
Gross. Gross gross gross. Tourists already get taxed. Hotel taxes are huge. It sucks. Traveling for conferences to meet new people and learn new things is soooo expensive and tourist taxes are a big part of why. Tourist taxes are how you destroy diversity and trap people into the tiny bubble in which they were born. We should be striving for the opposite.
- viraptor 8y ago
  A good solution here seems to be - don't organise conferences in places which are full of tourists already. You want to meet new people and learn? Great - book a country hotel and transport from the airport, or maybe a place in some town with reasonable plane connections. You want to also see the city? You're a tourist.
  - forrestthewoods 8y ago
    I could not possibly disagree more. Conferences are almost always a split of local and non-local attendees. Forcing conferences to be exclusively non-local attendees makes zero sense. It would be even more expensive, in absolute dollars and environmental cost, to have everyone travel to the middle of Nebraska. I know it's not your intent, but your stance here reeks of elistism, xenophobia, and othering. Extrapolating your worldview I don't know why a country hotel would, or even should, be accommodating. > don't organise conferences in places which are full of tourists already. This is absurd. Conferences are about people. Places with a lot of people will naturally have those people come together for events. Things that make a place attractive to live can also make it an attractive place to visit. Travel is so expensive it's almost crazy NOT to make the most out of your trip. Adding a day or two of tourism to a multi-day work or education trip is more than reasonable.
    - jaggederest 8y ago
      It's funny, because I've actually been contemplating the total costs of having conferences in areas outside the SF bay, and it's probably net cheaper to have people fly to the middle of nowhere AND rent a hotel PLUS conference space, than it is to simply rent the conference space in SF. Cost of living has grown so large that it's almost cheaper to fly into SFO every day from a regional airport instead of renting a hotel room.
buboard 8y ago
its not possible to do that in a viable way mainly because in many places tourists come from richer countries. An exorbitatly high deterrent-tax would paralyze the local market.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Generally speaking, "obvious" and very simple solutions of that sort to any kind of social problem tend to come with a raft load of unexpected and unintended consequences that can be difficult to prove and can be a net negative. I'm keenly interested in better understanding the problem space. I am very leery of such "obvious" answers.
mc32 8y ago
Bhutan provides an example of capping the tourists and charging a hefty visa fee for visitors. Tourism is not a human right and as such it's a luxury. It taxes all natural resources and exacerbates pollution (more disposable items and short lived items). Therefore, something akin to Bhutan could work for places which feel overwhelmed by tourists. (not proposing all places instate this, but rather places where the footprint of overtourism is too much to bear)
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  IIRC, Saudi Arabia does something similar with the Hajj, which they have to do because it's one of the largest annual human migrations.
  - klipt 8y ago
    An Arabian started a religion that mandates visiting Arabia. Now that's advertising!
- aaron695 8y ago
  > Tourism is not a human right and as such it's a luxury. The right to traverse the planet as a human being is a fundamental right. The concept you or anyone has the right through the force of arms to confine people is horrific. Bhutan might be a nice little zoo atm, but it's happiness index is very low by world standards and it's life expectancy is also low by world standards. The Zoo of Bhutan owned by its king might be nice for the mega rich to have to visit, but it's not so nice for its citizens. The king might be doing better than other countries in the region, but you'd have to make the case it's is the least worst option. I'm not convinced.
captainwhoreal 8y ago
What if someone local wants to use Airbnb, but there is a bed tax? What if you want to visit family in next town that happens to be touristy or what if you have a work placement? How do you distinguish tourists from non tourists?
holografix 8y ago
I guess it’s up to the city to decide whether it wants to: A) use tax and revenues from tourists to progressively change it self to accommodate more and more tourists. B) raise taxes so much that only cashed up tourists can afford to visit. C) preserve the city as it is, and install some form of tourist lottery to avoid only cashed up tourist from visiting.
jpalomaki 8y ago
Very high bed tax can make "unofficial tourist accommodation" more competitive compared to official hotels and hostels. Even though regulation tries to prohibit that, tracking down the providers can be difficult.

wild_preference 8y ago

Maybe you push out the profitable tourist and leave the sort of stinky dreadlocked backpacker who changes his baby's diaper on the airport gate kiosk and makes their destination a worse place than when they arrived.

frio 8y ago

Yeah, this is roughly where my thoughts lie. When my partner and I were travelling around Europe, many of the popular cities charged a bed tax — usually only a euro or two a night, so not enough to put us off in anyway, but in aggregate allowing the cities to invest in facilities that could support the tourist influx. Back home, there’s been debate about doing this too. I hope the pro-tax side wins. Our country is suffering under the annual tourist load, and we need more money in the pot to support it — at the basic end of the spectrum, there are lots of popular places that desperately need toilets and rubbish facilities for the tourists (and the locals) to use. Private industry cannot fill that gap (or, so far, has not) — and while the public are profiting from the visitors, more of that profit needs to be diverted to public coffers to enable the government to fix the problem. A bed tax is a great tool for helping that to happen.

pj_mukh 8y ago
"usually only a euro or two a night, so not enough to put us off in anyway, but in aggregate allowing the cities to invest in facilities that could support the tourist influx." This is exactly the right strategy! And the "infrastructure to support more tourists" is exactly what this article lays out.
- buboard 8y ago
  but if it's not enough to put them off, the tax doesn't work
  - pj_mukh 8y ago
    The idea isn't to put them off, that seems like a mindlessly cynical goal. Build the infrastructure to support the larger numbers. If the infrastructure needs to discriminate against tourists, that's fine too (e.g. added trains for tourists vs. commuters), new digital methods tool can allow for this.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      No, the idea is to put them off. It's basically impossible to "build infrastructure" to support them, whatever that means. There is no more room for trains or even sidewalks, so it would mean totally changing the cities into something else.
      - pj_mukh 8y ago
        Yes. Cities change. All the time. Why is this suddenly a problem? New train/subway lines are built (even in SF! [1]), sidewalks are widened (car lanes can be collapsed). None of this is new, in fact, this kind of growth and change has been the standard in the last 100 years of urban development. This doesn't stop now. [1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/15/18096775/bart-second-crossing-transbay-tube-bay-sf-transit https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/15/18096775/bart-second-crossi...
        akvadrako 8y ago
        It's obvious why this is a problem. Just look at Venice - when a city is mostly filled with tourists it becomes like a theme park. Are you serious about building subways and widening sidewalks there? I suppose you'll say everybody should just move out if they don't like it, but most people consider it the better option to plan how their cities evolve.
kaffee 8y ago
Check out Chicago or Montreal. The tourist tax is just massive.
- sologoub 8y ago
  Montreal looks to be only 3.5% extra, not exactly massive. Their sales and goods/services taxes are high, which works out to close to 20% total tax on a room. Still not that crazy. Source: https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g155032-i51-k6671607-How_much_are_hotel_taxes-Montreal_Quebec.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g155032-i51-k6671607-H...
  - kaffee 8y ago
    I think YUL has some of the highest airport fees for any major North American city. For example, there's an "Airport Improvement Fee" of 30 CAD (on every flight) https://www.aircanada.com/us/en/aco/home/legal/surcharges.html https://www.aircanada.com/us/en/aco/home/legal/surcharges.ht... My sense is that this is just one of many fees that hit you when you fly into Montréal. I think the total fees are more like 60-90 USD on every flight. (I'm not suggesting that high taxes are bad. I support aggressively high VAT taxes refunded to the poor and lower middle class.)
    - eigenvector 8y ago
      All Canadian airports have high AIFs (Toronto's is $25 for instance), and they are charged to everyone not just tourists. It's more to do with how airports are structured and managed in Canada versus other countries. It's a user-pay model rather than having them subsidized by the government. In fact many actually pay ground rent to the federal government.
      - volkl48 8y ago
        It's arguably not a model that has actually worked out very well for Canada. They push a significant portion of their air travelers over the US border for much cheaper flights. And they wind up with fewer flights and worse route options to their own domestic airports as a result. Ex: Burlington VT is about 40% Canadian, Plattsbugh + Niagara Falls NY are almost entirely Canadian traffic.

dgzl 8y ago

How would you differentiate a local vs. a tourist? Edit: is that even legal?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
longerthoughts 8y ago
In the US cities use things like hotel tax to target areas skewed towards tourist spending.
gsnedders 8y ago
It's typically a tax on accommodation, rather than anything else.
- dgzl 8y ago
  That's what I thought. Unfortunately that also affects locals, which diminishes the benefit.
  - thenanyu 8y ago
    Locals who stay at hotels? Usually these taxes are only on short term accommodations like hotels and Airbnb
    - maccard 8y ago
      They're also usually limited by duration. So it'll be x euro a night for the first 7 nights, with a max of Y per stay
    - dgzl 8y ago
      Yes, if the destination is say a city, then those who live even just an hour away want to come and stay sometimes. Same is true for beaches and lakes, near ski resorts, ect.

bobthepanda 8y ago

Part of it is also restricting location. Every large city has a tourist quarter that becomes devoid of everyday services for residents in favor of trinket shops and expensive, mediocre restaurants (e.g. Times Square in NYC). By introducing AirBnBs everywhere you run the risk of turning residential quarters into these dead zones. In contrast, hotels are very easy to restrict using zoning.

ip26 8y ago
The promise of Airbnb (I'm not a booster though) is that if you spread out the impact, you don't have to have any dead zones.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Except it doesn't work. People buy out apartments simply to AirBnB them, meaning one less local can live there. Others get driven out due to noise, and then yet another AirBnB company comes in an snatches them up. AirBnB is a huge issue that nobody seems willing to face, imo.

the_mitsuhiko 8y ago

> At risk of being labeled a "neoliberal idealist," why isn't the answer here simply taxing tourists more? Because that's really tricky to do without reducing the town to just tourism. Some people forget that in tourist towns there are also people who live, who have families and friends and some of their activities look very much like tourism. Sure, you can try to do all kinds of things to work around this but ultimately the solution of taxing tourists does not work well in practice.

elbasti 8y ago
Quite the opposite. If the worry is "too much tourists" well, just raise the tax until you have the desire amount of tourists! (and a lot more money in the coffers). What am I missing here? As an example, the country of Bhutan has zero desire for tourists, but instead of banning them they just charge a $250USD tax per day.
- selectodude 8y ago
  >but instead of banning them they just charge a $250USD tax per day. Hard to call that a tax when it includes lodging, a personal guide, a driver with car, food, and entrance fees to the things you go see. All you have to cover while there is tips and alcohol.
linkregister 8y ago
> ultimately the solution of taxing tourists does not work well in practice. Got any examples? Many cities in the world have tourism taxes, charged as a per-night fee added to hotel bills. Miami has a beach fee for tourists. Somehow, despite no income tax, Miami manages to stay solvent.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  I don't think Miami is worried about becoming reduced to just tourism (aren't they already?), so it's not really a counterexample to GP's point. Ed: explicitness

no_wizard 8y ago

In the USA I think the general populace is tax averse. Passing a new tax even one that could arguably be good for the local population or region, is a good way to get unelected, even in very liberal states. Local governments are incredibly susceptible to this, but it very clearly plays out nationally as well. The idea that government can “do good” in the USA is very co troversial at best. This is a great article about it, as a simple litmus https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/economy/slipping-behind-because-of-an-aversion-to-taxes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/economy/slipping...

closeparen 8y ago
This is why hotel taxes are popular. Voters don’t pay them.

forrestthewoods 8y ago

Gross. Gross gross gross. Tourists already get taxed. Hotel taxes are huge. It sucks. Traveling for conferences to meet new people and learn new things is soooo expensive and tourist taxes are a big part of why. Tourist taxes are how you destroy diversity and trap people into the tiny bubble in which they were born. We should be striving for the opposite.

viraptor 8y ago
A good solution here seems to be - don't organise conferences in places which are full of tourists already. You want to meet new people and learn? Great - book a country hotel and transport from the airport, or maybe a place in some town with reasonable plane connections. You want to also see the city? You're a tourist.
- forrestthewoods 8y ago
  I could not possibly disagree more. Conferences are almost always a split of local and non-local attendees. Forcing conferences to be exclusively non-local attendees makes zero sense. It would be even more expensive, in absolute dollars and environmental cost, to have everyone travel to the middle of Nebraska. I know it's not your intent, but your stance here reeks of elistism, xenophobia, and othering. Extrapolating your worldview I don't know why a country hotel would, or even should, be accommodating. > don't organise conferences in places which are full of tourists already. This is absurd. Conferences are about people. Places with a lot of people will naturally have those people come together for events. Things that make a place attractive to live can also make it an attractive place to visit. Travel is so expensive it's almost crazy NOT to make the most out of your trip. Adding a day or two of tourism to a multi-day work or education trip is more than reasonable.
  - jaggederest 8y ago
    It's funny, because I've actually been contemplating the total costs of having conferences in areas outside the SF bay, and it's probably net cheaper to have people fly to the middle of nowhere AND rent a hotel PLUS conference space, than it is to simply rent the conference space in SF. Cost of living has grown so large that it's almost cheaper to fly into SFO every day from a regional airport instead of renting a hotel room.

buboard 8y ago

its not possible to do that in a viable way mainly because in many places tourists come from richer countries. An exorbitatly high deterrent-tax would paralyze the local market.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Generally speaking, "obvious" and very simple solutions of that sort to any kind of social problem tend to come with a raft load of unexpected and unintended consequences that can be difficult to prove and can be a net negative. I'm keenly interested in better understanding the problem space. I am very leery of such "obvious" answers.

mc32 8y ago

Bhutan provides an example of capping the tourists and charging a hefty visa fee for visitors. Tourism is not a human right and as such it's a luxury. It taxes all natural resources and exacerbates pollution (more disposable items and short lived items). Therefore, something akin to Bhutan could work for places which feel overwhelmed by tourists. (not proposing all places instate this, but rather places where the footprint of overtourism is too much to bear)

bobthepanda 8y ago
IIRC, Saudi Arabia does something similar with the Hajj, which they have to do because it's one of the largest annual human migrations.
- klipt 8y ago
  An Arabian started a religion that mandates visiting Arabia. Now that's advertising!
aaron695 8y ago
> Tourism is not a human right and as such it's a luxury. The right to traverse the planet as a human being is a fundamental right. The concept you or anyone has the right through the force of arms to confine people is horrific. Bhutan might be a nice little zoo atm, but it's happiness index is very low by world standards and it's life expectancy is also low by world standards. The Zoo of Bhutan owned by its king might be nice for the mega rich to have to visit, but it's not so nice for its citizens. The king might be doing better than other countries in the region, but you'd have to make the case it's is the least worst option. I'm not convinced.

captainwhoreal 8y ago

What if someone local wants to use Airbnb, but there is a bed tax? What if you want to visit family in next town that happens to be touristy or what if you have a work placement? How do you distinguish tourists from non tourists?

holografix 8y ago

I guess it’s up to the city to decide whether it wants to: A) use tax and revenues from tourists to progressively change it self to accommodate more and more tourists. B) raise taxes so much that only cashed up tourists can afford to visit. C) preserve the city as it is, and install some form of tourist lottery to avoid only cashed up tourist from visiting.

jpalomaki 8y ago

Very high bed tax can make "unofficial tourist accommodation" more competitive compared to official hotels and hostels. Even though regulation tries to prohibit that, tracking down the providers can be difficult.