The hotel tax is back on the agendas of councils all over the Sunshine Coast, and for a lot of people it seems like a no brainer.
The hotel tax – or Municipal and Regional District Tax (MRDT) – is a two per cent increase in taxes on tourist accommodations: hotels, motels, B&Bs, etc. The only rule is that money that comes in has to be put back into tourism. (It’s not actually the only rule.)
Let’s say you stayed in a hotel that cost $100 a night. With the MRDT, your bill would have an extra two bucks on it. Not really a big deal for the tourists.
For governments it’s good idea. It’s revenue for the tourism sector that isn’t coming out of their budgets.
So why are about half of tourism accommodators on the Sunshine Coast opposed to it?
Their point of contention is that the money coming in – the two bucks times however many tourists – is going straight to Sunshine Coast Tourism (SCT), who get to do what they want with it (as long as it’s spent on tourism).
Colin MacLean, vice president of Sunshine Coast Accommodations Association, has said he would support the hotel tax if the actual accommodators saw some of the money.
The problem here is that two bucks per room per night doesn’t add up to that much. If you have a hotel with 10 rooms and you rent out all 10 all summer – let’s say 100 nights, just to do things evenly – you have $2,000.
OK, no one is going to say no to $2,000, but that’s a pretty generous assessment. Most of the B&Bs on the Coast don’t have 10 rooms and (I’m only guessing here) aren’t at capacity for the entire summer. And that’s only if you keep all of it.
So pooling the money into a big collective pot makes sense. It allows for expensive tourism campaigns, bigger ads, maybe even TV commercials.
But, how do we know it’s actually going to be spent on those things? The people at SCT could be spending it on campaigns that the accommodators don’t agree with or don’t like.
For this to work with everyone’s best interests in mind, there needs to be some kind of accountability from the SCT as to where the money will go.
I don’t really know what – an after-the-fact budget report isn’t going to do much good in this case and the democratic process would be unbearably slow. But it’s important that the accommodators feel like they have some control over what happens to the money that they are generating.
