Airbnb To Start Collecting Hotel Tax On Rentals In San Francisco

An anonymous reader writes Airbnb announced that it will begin collecting a 14% occupancy tax on behalf of its San Francisco hosts October 1. "This is the culmination of a long process that began earlier this year when we announced our intent to help collect and remit occupancy taxes in San Francisco," wrote Airbnb public policy leader David Owen. The company already collects taxes in Portland, and has discussed the possibility of collecting taxes in New York.

Comments

Uber announces UberRV

[Anonymous Coward]

Why stay in a hotel when you can stay on the road? Now, with UberRV, you can move around and avoid any pesky taxes. The law says if you're not parked, you're not living there, or at least that's what we're claiming this week. AirBNB is old news thanks to UberRV.

Re:Uber announces UberRV

[stephanruby]

and under our new fine print if the driver get's in accident you can get sued as well.

Putting the initial joke aside, here is the actual insurance policy from Uber.

There is actually nothing wrong with it, as far as I can tell.

Re:How long is rent going to go up before?dun dun

[AuMatar]

Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important. Being able to go over a design at a whiteboard together rather than reading the same powerpoint slide separately is important. THe best ideas I've had in my career have been created as a result of talking to my coworkers over lunch/coffee break/tangent from another discussion. Telecommuting is a loss to productivity even if they are perfect about actually working (which having done it for a year- its not an easy thing to do, there's a lot of temptations). Its not only easily worth 15-30k, its worth 2-3 times that to have then onsite. That's ignoring the fact that a large number of people won't be on point when working from home- many without even meaning to cheat the system.

Re:14%? What a f***ing ripoff

[CycleMan]

Transient Occupancy Taxes are generally higher, for exactly that reason. And note that TOTs are not normally set at the state level but instead at the city level.

4 cities...

[NotQuiteReal]

I live in California, but stayed in hotels in several other states in the last couple of weeks... 14% occupancy tax does seem high, but this is San Francisco, they love taxes up there...

Dallas = Room + 2% DTPID Fee + 7.1% City Tax + 6.1% State Tax
NYC = Room + Sales Tax 8.875% + Occupancy Tax 5.875% + Room Tax $2.00 + Room Unit Tax $1.55
Boston = Room + State Tax 5.7% + City Tax 6% + CCF Tax 2.75%
Philadelphia = Room + Lodging Tax 8.5% + Sales Tax 8%


In Europe they are much more civilized about it -- they just toss in some huge VAT tax (like 20%) and may or may not mention that it is "included" (how thoughtful of them.) In some places there are still more taxes - in Dublin Ireland, my hotel bill had the room fee, with VAT included, but also added "other local taxes and fees" amounting to 9.25% of that...

In general, the observation that taxing visitors is popular is accurate, and accelerating, it seems.