Tourist tax: Airbnb wants to play the good students in 700 cities, Le Figaro

The famous platform of the accommodation wants to conclude agreements on taxes with 700 cities. One way to avoid trouble in the future.

Threatened on all sides of reprisals and tax laws, Airbnb plays more active deminers. The site of rental accommodation is thus seeking to conclude agreements on taxes with 700 cities in total in order to limit the risk of possible changes in tax policy against it, said on Monday his boss Brian Chesky in an interview with the Financial Times.

The company has already signed agreements with 200 cities and would like to sign another 500 by 2018, ” he says. The towns represent 90% of the activity of the platform. “When you have an agreement on taxes, you have an explicit agreement, and there is consequently more of a risk to their existence,” explained the officer.

In France, its second largest market after the United States, Airbnb has put in place the automatic collection of the tax from its users in Paris and Chamonix in 2015, and has since extended this procedure to other large cities. Abroad, cities such as Amsterdam, Portland, and San Francisco, have adopted the same practice.

The platform is in the sights of many urban areas around the world, often in the sights of the tourism industry which believes that the success of these rental sites in line not subject to the same legal and tax constraints is a shortfall. This has not prevented very recently the president of a quebec association of hoteliers virulent against this site being identified as an owner user of the platform to rent out his villa in the caribbean.