See my sibling comment to understand.

Also it's not just about the hotel location, but also changes depending on the buyer's location -- which of course often isn't known until the checkout process.

So maybe it's not quite so simple, with so cartoonish a villain, as you assume.

Is it so complicated that only Europeans can do it; Americans are too unintelligent to match?

Please stop being rude and chauvinistic.

If European countries chose to have VAT that varied geographically within a country, they wouldn't be able to build it into the price either.

Why you think it has anything to do with "national intelligence" is quite beyond me.

Well…they do… https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/value-added-tax-2023-v...

No they don't.

That clearly shows rates varying between countries.

Not within a country.

Which is fine, because prices are generally advertised within a country, not Europe-wide.

You're showing tax variations across countries. I see tax variations within a couple of miles!

I'm curious where you have ever seen a national advertisement for a hotel room that includes a price; it is not something I've observed but perhaps my chauvinism has blinded me. That said, do you think that a hotel company is able to calculate the price of a room when I go onto their online portal and request a price for a particular location and date?

The usual strategy is to nationally advertise "as low as" some base $$ amount. And then you go into the online portal and come up with an actual price for an actual date that (hopefully) includes all taxes and fees--and is probably a fair bit more.

Perhaps the Americans chose poorly.

In certain states, some customers such as disabled veterans are exempt from hotel occupancy tax. So the tax rate isn't necessarily the same for everyone.