It's not just the hotel tax; it's also that zoning boards are tough on hotels, limiting their options and driving their real estate costs up.

I don't agree. If you are a hotel, you are a corporation who's primary business and income is renting out rooms. If you have what is usually just a sole proprietorship, you should not be subject to the hotel tax. What is it whit this damn country that people want to just start bending definitions and terms to fit their despotic little minds will.

What, next we're going to require Sally's lemonade stand comply with Sarbanes Oxley??? I can't stand it when people want to bend the rules just because things are not turning out how they had hoped or in their favor.

When Sally's lemonade stand expands to thousands of locations across the country and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, it will have to comply with Sarbanes Oxley, along with all the other regulations in the food and beverage industry.

AirBnb is a pretty big corporation at this point, they should start playing by the rules.

Lets be clear, you are the only who wants to bend the rules for the people doing AirBNB. AirBNB is a hotel company, essentially. I don't see any reason why it should have a free 14% margin over hotels .

Some people are renting out a spare room, or maybe the whole house for a couple of weeks while they're away. Some people are buying properties purely to rent out via AirBnB, making use of a surprisingly large number of startups set up to provide guest screening, cleaning and welcoming services for AirBnB guests, and having it as one of their main income sources. Not only is it the latter group attracting the attention, it's also the latter group that's bending the definition of "hotel" to avoid being classified as one.

I cannot stand it when people start to apply rule exemptions as a rule.

Generally rules are designed for general case, yet in some (legally or not) specific cases we just close our eyes. Sally's lemonade stand is an exception - even though agencies could fine her to oblivion we just don't do that, because it is more beneficial for society. If she starts doing that on any scale larger than several hours per month, then it could very well be entirely different story.

In some parts of the world it is illegal to be drunk in public. Bars are public, buses are public. Even though you are braking the law just by going home on a bus/taxi after a night out, noone will arrest you if you are doing that quietly.

Hotel is by definition place that provides lodging on short term basis. And general rule is that hotels pay taxes. Again noone is going to extract taxes for allowing some friend of friend even if it involves direct or indirect (we call it barter) reimbursement.

AirBnB is not letting friend of friend stay for a night. It is a business. So, please, stop bending the rules yourself and try to claim that lodging regulations should not apply to AirBnB.

> What is it whit this damn country that people want to just start bending definitions and terms to fit their despotic little minds will.

I actually mostly agree with this. Laws are generally designed in a manner "mostly people will not do foo or neighbourhoods will sort it out themselves, therefore enforcing regulation on foo will be more expensive than revenue generated". And then come people like you, who try to bend definitions in a way that implicit social contract works in their favour.

> If you are a hotel, you are a corporation who's primary business and income is renting out rooms. If you have what is usually just a sole proprietorship, you should not be subject to the hotel tax. What is it whit this damn country that people want to just start bending definitions and terms to fit their despotic little minds will.

Hotels may be corporations, but they can also be other business forms, including sole proprietorships or partnerships. Sole proprietorship hotels aren't particularly uncommon. You are the one bending definitions.

> What, next we're going to require Sally's lemonade stand comply with Sarbanes Oxley???

Most SOX provisions apply -- by their text -- to public companies; except things like rules prohibiting willful destruction of evidence related to a federal investigation. Obviously, by the text of the law, the former wouldn't apply to a typical lemonade stand, and, the latter wouldn't apply to anything a typical lemonade stand would do even to the extent that the rule would in principal apply to them.

whether you transact business as a corporation or a sole proprietorship, you should be taxed and treated the same. this is the silliest thing ive ever heard.

and frankly, all airbnb renters should be treated as a class(or a franchisee), in which case they are more like a corporation then a sole proprietor.

There's also the Hotel Act in most cities which allows police to enter whenever they want. Airbnb rentals are private so can't do their prostitution entrapment stings. They are already lobbying here claiming the sky is falling because they don't have unfettered access to shakedown tourists anymore.

They pass the collected taxes onto the government, and probably have the same opinion on hotel taxes as a retail shop would have on sales tax - it would boost business somewhat, if it were lower, but oh well.

From personal anecdotal experience, when traveling alone for short term, chain hotels are frequently cheaper than AirBnB - the host has to hit you up with cleaning fee per stay, while a large hotel has economies of scale working in its favor as far as cleaning, parking, utility bills and other stuff.

Retail shops also have a right to be upset if say online shops don't have to pass on the sales tax and they do.