KINGSTON – Ulster County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach would like the county legislature to examine whether online short-term room and home rental companies like Airbnb and VRBO should be required to pay the same room tax as traditional hotels.
County law requires a two percent occupancy tax on hotel and motel rooms.
Auerbach said the law “needs to catch up to what is going on around
us in reality.” He noted that Airbnb alone would conceivably
have to pay the county a significant amount of room tax money.
“This past summer, they put 17 million guests and connected them with homeowners and the three specific areas that they cite that are the most popular routes in these bookings are Paris to Lisbon and the next one is the Catskills and the Hudson Valley,” the comptroller said. “So I have to believe that we are losing the potential of revenue in this particular case.”
Auerbach said legislation would be necessary to capture those new types of businesses under “our somewhat antiquated tax structure.”
