Portland is the worst US city for travel taxes... (Beaverton: rental car, sales)

[ryanmm]

...according to this:

Travel taxes: The worst US cities for travel taxes | The Economist

Good thing? Bad thing?

Frankly I expected to see Seattle on this list, not Portland.

[Nell Plotts]

I don't think it is a significant factor one way or the other. The daily rates upon which the travel tax is assessed are less than other communities on the list. The 'low' cities all have significant sales tax to they are picking the pockets of travelers too. Rental car taxes out of PDX are typical, and frankly avoidable if the traveler takes the MAX to Beaverton or Hillsboro (Washington County) and rents a car there.

[SyraBrian]

People have pointed out that the key word is "discriminatory". This means the difference between things like the hotel rate and the general sales tax.

Since Oregon has no sales tax, any hotel tax is going to register as extremely discriminatory. San Diego's hotel tax rate is 10.5% and Portland's is 11.5%. But since California has a large sales tax, their room tax is seen as much fairer.

Of course, any difference will be more than negated with one decent meal in each town per day.

[The Cactus Leaguer]

Here is the link to the actual GBTA article:

GBTA Reveals Best and Worst Travel Taxes in Top 50 U.S. Destinations

Since the article also states that Portland has one of the LOWEST total travel tax burdens when factoring in sales taxes, I think the title of this thread is highly misleading.

That being said, I would love to see how the GBTA made this conclusion regarding hotel tax rates (but not so much that I want to pay for their report). One of the projects we did when I volunteered for the group that was trying to bring MLB to PDX was to look at alternative funding sources to help pay for the cost of a new stadium. Hotel and rental car taxes would have been near the top the list for the following reasons:

1. Portland had fairly low hotel and rental car taxes compared to most of the other similar-sized or larger cities in the US;
2. Travel taxes tend to be fairly inelastic in smaller increments, meaning they don't negatively impact demand for the item being taxed; and
3. The tax is politically easier to sell because it affects visitors, not the locals who vote on it.

However, this funding source was not available because the state legislature passed a law years ago saying that the rates could not be raised unless those funds were tapped specifically to promote tourism.