I will support any policy that fights over tourism.
You should never feel like a foreigner in your own hometown, a tourist should never cause displacement of locals
Do you want rich, entitled, assholes everywhere? That’s how you get rich, entitled, assholes.
But this tax only affects top hotels
Shitty headline writing strikes again.
“900%” is both a sensationalist way of describing it, and also not even applicable to the overwhelming majority of visitors.
Yeah, it’s a hotel tax and scales with the price of the hotel. The top end (for hotel over $665 a night) is a 10% tax.
also I’ll throw in that because the yen is so weak vs the dollar at the moment (hence the overtourism), $665 a night is in of itself understating the kind of place we’re talking about. ¥100,000 in 2012 was $1,300. Minimum wage is ¥1,000/hour.
I just had a quick search on a bookings site, and 80 out of the 103 five-star hotels in Kyoto are under that threshold, and of those, 40 are under $350. If you’re being hit by the top rate then the place you’re staying in is bougie as f.
Also also, my reading of it is that it isn’t a 10% tax, it’s a stepped tax equal to 10% of the bottom of its bracket, i.e. it’s ¥10,000 regardless of whether your room was ¥100,000 or ¥300,000.
OP’s “Tourists in Kyoto will soon face a 900% increase in a tax” summary would be more accurately stated as “Tourists staying in one of Kyoto’s 23 most expensive hotels, will face a 9 percentage point increase in tax”.
10%, that’s a large difference than 900%. This is one of the times I came to the comments to see if the article is worth reading, now I guess I have to to figure out the fuck they meant
It was 1%. 1% to 10% is in fact a 900% increase, it just sounds a lot scarier than it actually is.
Yeah, it was definitely a get readers attention scare tactic. 10% tax on hotels is nothing.
It’s like saying “We had to raise our taxes to match that of Florida districts due to federal cuts by Trump”
Sensationalism, but some may be more true than others
You could read the article.
Sir/ma’am I’m from reddit, change is hard and scary
No shit, what else would I have meant?
All that’s gonna do is get you the biggest D bag tourists
Read the article, the 900% increase is only for the most expensive rooms.
Yep the biggest douches in the USA have lots of money.
It’ll keep out most of the weebs though
They just want to cash in more. Let’s face it, the city likes tourist revenue and felt like they could get more.
And good for them to do it. Tourism causes a lot of negative externalities; this tax helps mitigate some of those externalities.
They work better as revenue generators than as actual deterrents to tourism.
Places that experience over-tourism generally need tax revenue to fix issues like lack of affordable housing, or raising pay for municipal workers that provide services that arent important to tourists and only matter to locals
If they wanted to simply deter tourism then they could just close hotels, ban air bnbs, etc. The point is to still have tourism but check its growth against the strangulation effect it has on local life
They don’t actually want to deter it, they want to pay for its harmful impacts.
