tourism
Booking pays Italian tax authorities 94 million euros
The app of the travel booking portal Booking.com on a smartphone photo
© Fabian Sommer/dpa
The dispute has been dragging on for years. The travel booking portal is supposed to subsequently pay VAT worth millions in Italy. Now there is an agreement – also to the satisfaction of Booking.
The dispute was about rentals between 2013 and 2019. The Italian state accused the company of having evaded a total of 153 million euros from hundreds of thousands of rentals. Booking does not rent itself, but acts as an accommodation broker. However, many private landlords are not registered with a tax number in Italy. The tax authorities therefore see the online portal as responsible for ensuring that the tax is paid correctly.
The Italian state is also in a dispute with the online accommodation provider AirBnB over several hundred million euros. Last Monday, a judge in Milan ordered that Airbnb must hand over around 780 million euros to the tax authorities. The group is said to have not paid a tax on income from short-term rentals of 21 percent from 2017 to 2021. The so-called uniform tax on rental income was introduced in 2017. The housing platform sued, but failed before the European Court of Justice.
Italy’s current right-wing government even wants to increase the tax to 26 percent in order to combat housing shortages and high rents. Many landlords in Rome and other cities prefer to offer their apartments to tourists for more money.