Tourism News
As counties look to find money to scrape by during the tough economic times, some are targeting tourism dollars to supplement their budget restraints. While ORLA understands that this is an issue of funding various county services, counties must not lose sight of tourism’s vitality to the future of their economies.
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Online travel companies (OTCs) typically calculate state and local hotel occupancy taxes based on the wholesale cost they pay to a hotel for a room, resulting in lower taxes collected by state and local jurisdictions for rooms booked through an OTC. Here in Oregon, local jurisdictions, tourism promotion organizations and industry members have been meeting to reaffirm the belief that all taxes should be remitted on the retail rate paid by consumers. Read ORLA's OTC Tax Issue Paper.
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The 2011 Legislative Session proved to be a positive one for Oregon’s tourism promotion efforts. Three major bills were signed into law that will influence tourism throughout the state. ORLA continued the fight against higher lodging tax rates and efforts to take away tourism funding allocations, and successfully protected the system established to reinvest lodging tax revenues back into tourism promotion.
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We, like most in the lodging industry, benefit from business travel, conferences and events, and tourism. When a film or television company makes the decision to produce their production in Oregon, they are often making the decision to spend millions of dollars throughout our state, and there is no doubt that a significant amount of that money coming into our state gets spent on the restaurant and lodging industry.
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Major online travel companies have launched a deceitful campaign to urge both the general public and the travel industry to contact Congress in support of the "Internet Travel Tax Fairness Act" (ITTFA). For years, the online travel companies (OTCs) have upheld that they should not be subject to remitting their fair share of state and local hotel occupancy taxes. Instead, they've been remitting hotel occupancy taxes on only the discounted wholesale price that they pay for hotel rooms, rather than remitting hotel occupancy taxes on the retail rate they actually charge the customer for the room.
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