YANGON, 16 May 2017: Myanmar Tourism Federation says the country will soon impose a tourist tax on visitors to fund the country’s tourism promotional activities.
Myanmar Times quoted the federation’s chairman, U Yan Win, saying the scheme was decided by the tourism development committee during a meeting with Ministry of Hotels and Tourism late last month.
“The committee decided that tourists, even visitors travelling on a business visa, would have to pay USD1 each per night when they stay at hotels or guest houses.”
The fee will be added automatically to the guest’s bill, requiring hotels to pass on the tax to the authorised collection agency.
When all the “administrative” deductions are made at at provincial level the net tax forwarded to the federation could be much less a dollar per night, per traveller.
The World Travel and Tourism Council is likely to express dismay at the decision as it opposes increasing the tax burden for travellers saying it often deters visitors and impacts negatively on a country’s overall earnings.
But there are other concerns focusing on how the federation would manage a budget of around USD3 million if the entire tax was passed on to the public-private marketing body. Issues over transparency would have to be resolved and possibly some portion of the tax would be channeled to the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism for its own projects.
Travellers would probably be happier to pay the tax if was used to support environmental projects and seen to be countering the damage tourism inflicts on communities, rather than supporting tourism expansion through marketing and advertising that encourages more mass tourism.
The scheme will take about six months for the government to approve before it becomes law.
The tourism ministry will have to draft a law, which will then be submitted to the State Counsellor for approval, the chairman added.
Last year, MTF’s tourism market committee applied for USD30 million from the hotels and tourism ministry to fund its tourism promotions, the report said.
Myanmar welcomed 2.9 million tourist arrivals last year, a decline of 38% in comparison to the 4.68 million visitors in 2015. The huge decline was attributed mainly to new data collection criteria. The ministry no longer includes day trippers who travel on border passes. Most of them are traders who cross the border for business and return the same day. The travel industry said the inclusion skewed the genuine tourist and revenue calculations on which business plans and market campaigns are based.
The previous system counted all visitors passing international border checkpoints. The current system differentiates between tourists, business travellers, and day trippers.
(Source: For full report visit http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/lifestyle/travel/25799-myanmar-to-start-collecting-tourism-tax.html.)