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Hotel in Cologne: Unsuccessful lawsuit against bed tax
Photo: Oliver Berg/ dpa
Cities and municipalities may demand a so-called bed tax from overnight guests.
The Federal Constitutional Court rejected complaints by hoteliers from Hamburg, Bremen and Freiburg against the respective local taxes.
The court in Karlsruhe announced on Tuesday that the encroachment on the freedom of action in the area of property law and the freedom of hotel operators to practice their profession is justified.
The tax does not burden the affected companies excessively.
The states would also have had the power to enact the relevant law.
After the decision of the First Senate, the cities could even extend the levy to hotel accommodation and also impose a bed tax on professional overnight stays.
Above all, after the value added tax for hotel accommodation was reduced from 19 percent to seven percent in 2010, municipalities introduced a bed tax to compensate for the resulting loss of income.
So far, however, it has only been collected from private individuals.
Business travelers are exempt from the tax because the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig considered such a distinction to be necessary in 2012.
However, this has not yet been seen by the Federal Constitutional Court.
More and more cities have been levying the levy for years.
Officially, the bed taxes are called, for example, culture or tourism promotion tax, city tax, lodging tax or overnight stay tax.
The basic principle is always the same: Usually, a certain percentage of the accommodation price is due per person and night, usually around five percent.
Sometimes a fixed amount has to be paid, for example three euros per night.
In Hamburg, the amount is graded according to the overnight price.
The hotel industry sees itself disadvantaged by the effort.
The retail trade, for example, also benefits from tourism, criticizes the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (Dehoga), which supports the complaining hoteliers.
According to the latest Dehoga overview, a total of 30 municipalities had a bed tax at the beginning of 2019.
From a legal point of view, one of the issues in Karlsruhe was how similar the municipal fee is to sales tax.
Because according to the Basic Law, local expenditure taxes may only be collected “as long as and insofar as they are not of the same kind as taxes regulated by federal law”.
(Az. 1 BvR 2868/15 and others)
mmq/Reuters/dpa/AFP
