Panadero, c'mon, how many ticos have to stay in hotels REALLY? Besides, if you notice, Tampabayman never specified only GRINGO tourists, but IF this tax was really JUST for HOTELS then it clearly WOULD at least be targetted at TOURISTS, who come mostly from other countries, rather than at ordinary tico citizens. A better question would be HOW MUCH of that 16.39% tax is just for hotels.
The actual breakdown for the CURRENT tax has been 13% SALES Tax and 3.39% EXTRA for the special HOTEL tax. For comparison, the surcharge at the better restaurants in CR is actually 23% - 13% SALES Tax and 10% for Service Fees (in leiu of tip). I suppose you could say that such upscale restaurants are also mostly geared to tourists too, but I'm pretty sure the same surcharges apply to any ticos that eat in those places too.
When you get into the cheaper hotels (like the Nuevo Johnson) or cheaper restuarants (like most sodas), in other words the types of places most ticos are more likely to stay or dine, you don't normally see any of these taxes. Is that because they simply don't report their income or pay those taxes themselves (as they are supposed to) or is it because they're actually at a level that is exempt from taxation? I'm not really sure. Maybe, our resident encyclopedia Prof. ID can enlighten us further (I never really thought about it much before but now I'm kinda curious).
Actually, this topic of hotel taxes is a good current events question right now.
Just this past November, a NEW tax of $15 per passenger on flights into CR was approved. I'm not sure WHEN it is supposed to be implemented. Any way, this new tax was designed to REPLACE the hotel tax and is expected to bring in $25M vs. only ~$10M for the 3.39% hotel tax. They also expect it to be easier to enforce and collect. Part of the reason the old hotel tax was bringing in less revenue was because many hotels were not fully reporting the number of room nights they were actually selling. Which is kinda phucked up, if you think about it and consider that most of the time tourists were still paying the tax to the hotels. It gave the hotels an excuse to jack up what tourists paid over their posted rates, while they simply pocketed all the money. To be fair, there were also times when the savings were passed on to the tourists, such as when they got signigicantly lower "cash rates".
Will those instances of specially discounted cash rates be harder to find now that 3% tax portion of the savings will no longer be part of the equation, or at least will the savings offered be a little less? Will some hotels still try to slip in the 3% surcharge even after the tax is officially eliminated? And when (if ever) will these changes take effect (or have they already)? The answers to those questions are probably yes and no and who knows, but they're potentially interesting questions.
As for the "excessiveness" of the CR sales tax (and now the airport tax) hitting tourists disproportionately hard, I'm not so sure I'd characterize that as inherently unfair. Would it be more fair to structure taxes so that more of it had to come out of the pockets of tico citizens who typically make only $500-600/
month? Why not try to tax the people most able to pay, particularly if they don't vote and don't seem so fazed by the tax system that it has kept them from coming to CR? Relatively much wealthier tourists WANT to come to CR. CR businesses already get a huge portion of their income from these tourists ($2B per year). Why shouldn't ICT and the CR government get a piece of that pie. It takes marketing to get tourists to continue to come to CR and that costs money. Tourists place demands on CR infrastructure in terms of additional electricity, sewage treatment, road repair and improvements, etc. and all of that costs money too. And the local citizens don't have the money to pay for these things, so why shouldn't the government get some of the money to help pay for those things directly from the people who demand it the most and have the money to pay for it? If anyone thinks these tax rates makes the cost of a CR vacation too expensive, then no one is forcing them to come to CR. However,over the years enough tourists have wanted to come (and come back) to CR badly enough that they've been willing to pay these taxes and, until this past recession, in ever increasing numbers. So evidently "fair" or not, that aspect of their tax system seems to work pretty well for CR.
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Its really gratifying to know someone is actually reading my voluminous writings so carefully that they'd catch careless mistakes like that. Yes, I did mean "per month". Thanks Ciao
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