Someone told me that when he went to NYC some years ago he was charged a $50.00 per night tax on his room. When I booked I noticed a 13.62% room tax. Has anyone else experienced extra charges above this?

Someone will tell you exactly what the current tax is, but it is actually lower than a few years ago. At one point, I believe it had reached something like 20% at least on luxury hotels, but part of that tax was dropped.

It was something like 18-19% for several years-- really added up quickly. 13.62% sounds like a relative bargain.

A room quoted as 299 will end up costing you 341.74

Oops, here's the breakdown:

1 REGULAR RATE 299.00 USD
TTL TAX 40.74 TTL SURCHARGES 2.00
25.79 STATE SALES
14.95 CITY
2.00 OCCUPANCY
APPROX. TOTAL PRICE 341.74 USD

The taxes are 13.62%, plus $2 per room per night. In other words, if you had a two-room suite, it would be 13.62%, plus $4 a night.

I don't know what NYC charges, but I can tell you EVERY city does exactly the same thing on hotels and rental cars. I rented a car recently in Orlando and taxes/surcharges/fees came to over 20% of the cost.

Tourists make an easy target for taxes and every single city in the country knows that.

Ryan,if you thought Orlando was bad, you'll never want to rent from Phoenix's sky harbor airport. The taxes, etc. add an additional 60% to the base rate!

"Tourists make an easy target for taxes and every single city in the country knows that."

I hope this wasn't meant as a negative. When you live in a city as dependent on tourism as we are (Naples, Florida) you soon learn that all those roads and services that had to be built strictly to handle the tourists might be better paid by the tourists themselves instead of out of the residents' pocketbooks.

Ironically, a few years ago when our town tried to add a "bed tax" of 1%, since raised to 2%, there was a major outcry from the powerful tourism board, saying no one would ever come here again if we taxed hotel rooms. How dumb was that? Where else were these people going to go and NOT be taxed on their hotel rooms?

Incidentally all that tax money MUST be spend on tourist related projects, including beach renourishment, special events, and advertising to get even more tourists.

Patrick,
Wasn't meant as a negative at all but a recognition of political reality. My view is that if I'm paying an extra 5 or 10% for a car rental, chances are I'm benefitting from it on the other side with those coming to my state and to NYC.

But, I think, as NYC learned under former mayor Dinkins, a fix that Guiliani rectified immediately upon taking office, is that you can tax yourself out of some tourist and convention business. NYC's old hotel tax rate was about 20%, a rate which scared away some convention business.

Cutting that back to 13%ish, was proven to be a case of less being more within a few years.