With an election on the horizon, tourism bosses are back lobbying politicians to slap a brand-new national tax on every hotel room, motel, and Airbnb booking in the country.
Regional Tourism New Zealand, the lobby group representing 31 regional tourism organisations, wants every political party to commit to a nationwide accommodation levy. Their reasoning: ratepayers are footing the bill for paths, toilets, carparks, wastewater systems and transport infrastructure that visitors put pressure on, and councils are increasingly stuck covering the cost.
So the solution, naturally, is another charge on the public, this time aimed at the people staying in hotels and short-term rentals.
To be fair, the levy as proposed wouldn’t hit everyone equally. It would apply across all accommodation types but specifically target shorter stays, sparing workers and people in longer-term temporary accommodation. The group is also pushing for a national register of short-term rentals, Airbnbs and the like, so those operators get roped into paying as well. More registration, more compliance, more government oversight of how Kiwis rent out their own properties.
Chair Andrew Wilson is framing this as visitors simply “contributing” to the places they enjoy. His words: “At the moment, we’ve obviously got a lot of burden placed on residents and ratepayers having to fund this type of infrastructure and these assets,” and that the goal is to “make sure the visitors contribute to that in a modest and fair way.”
Wilson insists the money would be governed independently, reported through long-term plans, and funnelled back into the region it came from, supposedly tying visitor demand directly to local investment. In his telling: “An accommodation levy gives us the tools to invest in the places visitors come to experience — the infrastructure, the events, and the amenities that make New Zealand destinations world-class.” He adds it’s about “enabling communities to grow tourism well and giving the industry a sustainable foundation to build on.”
Wilson’s warning, of course, is that without this new funding tap, visitor experiences will degrade. And he’s careful to add the levy “must not replace existing council investment” but only add to it.
This isn’t a new idea, either. Queenstown Lakes residents already voted in favour of a bed tax back in 2019, before the pandemic upended everything. Auckland, for its part, got a promise that a bed tax would at least be considered as part of its city deal signing earlier this year. Now the industry wants to skip the patchwork entirely and go straight for a single, centralised, nationwide tax, “done once and done at a national level,” as Wilson put it, rather than risk a “whole variety of different arrangements” across the country.
And who would they like to see collecting this new levy? Inland Revenue, using its existing GST machinery, naturally, since nothing says “modest new charge” quite like handing the job straight to the tax department.