Going to Europe? Be Prepared for New Visitor Taxes.
When Hester Van Buren, a deputy mayor of Amsterdam, recently proposed a 1 percent increase to the city’s tourist accommodation tax — which is already among the highest in Europe — her City Council colleagues responded with a single criticism: They wanted the increase to be even bigger.“We have a lot of costs for the city, of course — for well-being, for livability,” Ms. Van Buren said in a recent interview at Amsterdam’s City Hall. “We don’t want to increase the taxes for our inhabitants. So we said, ‘Well, let the visitors pay some more.’”Across Europe, many of Ms. Van Buren’s counterparts are having similar thoughts. After several years of steady growth in urban tourism leading up to the pandemic, many European cities have found new ways to tax visitors, who are at once an important sou...
