Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
tourism tax takes off across the globe
Why your favourite foreign cities and countries might soon tell you to pay more to visit
TO MANY visitors to New Zealand, an excursion to Waitangi and its stunning surroundings is considered a must. The country’s founding document was signed there in
1840 and a museum on the historic grounds draws 100 000 visitors a year.
Its history might have turned Waitangi into one of the country’s premier attractions, but its presence in travel guides has come at a cost.
Only about 2 000 inhabitants live in the area, which also includes the nearby town of Paihia. At least once a year, during the Waitangi public holiday on February 6, more than 15 times as many domestic and foreign visitors were expected to flock to the town.
For years, residents living near
New Zealand’s top tourist attractions warned that the rising numbers of tourists were catching many towns or nature reserves largely unprepared.
The government has come up with a plan: a one-time tourist tax of around NZ$35 (R320), which is due to be introduced later this year and will help finance new infrastructure projects and environmental preservation efforts.
It’s an approach that is gaining momentum elsewhere, too, as more countries and cities face growing tourism numbers. Between 2017 and last year, global tourism arrivals increased by 6.8%, to 1.3 billion. Back in 2000, it was half that number.
While most cities and countries across the world wish for more visitors, a minority are increasingly viewing them as a burden.
Amsterdam, for instance, has struggled to come to terms with becoming a European party hub for legal weed consumers. It hiked its overnight room taxes from 6% to 7% last year to balance out the growing costs of its new reputation.
Similarly popular Barcelona recently saw anti-tourism protests by locals who instead demanded a higher refugee intake. Officials there and in other major cities such as Paris and Berlin responded in recent years to those concerns by increasing room taxes for tourists, too – including for Airbnb and other online platforms. Scotland’s Edinburgh is pondering whether it should follow suit.
Outside Europe, authorities on the Indonesian island of Bali are having similar thoughts.
Venice became the latest major city with specific plans for such taxes on Monday. Officials said a day entry fee to the historic centre of about $3.40 (R46) a person could take effect as early as May, with plans to increase the tax to up to $11 in coming years.
To Venice’s leadership, collecting an entry fee into a city avoids the detour via the national government in Rome, which would have to collect such taxes nationally and then distribute them locally.
Whether New Zealand’s national approach could even work in Europe remains questionable, anyway.
Within much of the continent, national tourism taxes would make little sense because they would not apply to most visitors from within the EU. Europe’s borderless Schengen Zone ensures EU residents can travel between countries without restrictions, but the treaty says nothing about cities, which is why Venice and other tourist hot spots are taking matters into their own hands.
Iceland, which is also located within the Schengen Zone, pondered introducing a New Zealand- or Venice-style tax two years ago, which would probably have mainly hit non-EU tourists. But after its devastating banking crisis in 2008, the country depends heavily on tourism. Afraid of halting a trend that has seen visitor numbers quadruple since 2008, officials recently travelled to New Zealand to gather alternative ideas. Overnight room taxes, which are common across Europe, offer one revenue stream.
In Iceland and New Zealand, authorities are experimenting with the next step: how to spend the money. The obvious way is to improve the infrastructure, including widening roads, improving utilities and expanding hospitals to accommodate the flow of people.
One of their most pressing issues, officials in Iceland and in New Zealand complain, is that online recommendations have turned insider tips into must-do bucket list attractions. While Instagram shots take minutes to gain traction online, infrastructure improvements can take years or decades.
Educating tourists on how to behave or advertising alternative destinations could be an easy intermediate solution.
But in a city like Venice, which floods at least once a year and is on almost every Europe traveller’s mind, there’s a limit to how much that infrastructure can be improved.
Besides its new planned tax, authorities there have found another solution: whenever things become too messy, pedestrian gates around the historic centre simply shut down – no matter how much you’re willing to pay to get in. | Washington Post