Ottawa soon to charge Airbnb users with the new ‘accommodation tax’

Saturday, May 19, 2018

The tagline of Airbnb – “belong anywhere” will come with a premium price tag for the travelers to Ottawa this summer 2018.

 
Initiating on August this year, a 4 percent accommodation tax will be added with all the Ottawa listings by all the well-known home rental companies. In Ontario, it’s the first tax of this type. However, this was already executed for Ottawa hotels and motels in January of this year. It’s also one of some 350 tax agreements the online rental service by now has with governments worldwide, along with Quebec and British Columbia.

 
For Ottawa, it signifies bulky revenue from its 2,700 active Airbnb hosts in the city.
“We’re looking at potentially between $300,000 and $360,000 this year,” said Ottawa’s Deputy City Treasurer of Revenue, Wendy Stephanson. “Then we’re going to monitor it from there to see what it looks like on an annual basis.”

 
The step comes after a landmark year related to Ottawa tourism, thanks to the Canada 150 celebrations, when tens of thousands of people came down on Parliament Hill and the adjoining area to observe the 150th birthday of the country. Around 185,000 people in 2017 utilized Airbnb in Ottawa, as per the app data, and Airbnb calculates that Ottawa has the chance to make $850,000 from the tax. However, the numbers won’t probably reach those heights once again. International tourism to Canada created an annual record in 2017with 20.8 million trips of one or more nights, according to Statistics Canada data.

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