Virginia Senate Looking to Get Tough w/Online Travel Companies

Amidst the frenzy of “Amazon Tax” bills sweeping the country, including in the Commonwealth of Virginia, I didn’t have a chance to make mention of a bill introduced in – and passed – by that state’s senate requiring online travel companies to collect sales and hotel taxes on the retail (not the wholesale) price on [...]

Anaheim Loses $21.3M Claim Against Online Travel Companies

In what can only be deemed a rather sizable victory for online travel companies, who have been beleaguered by lawsuits and audits from coast to coast at the city, county, and state level, a case in California gives the usual players joyous respite in their fight. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl this [...]

The Online Hotel Room Tax Battle Rages In Florida and Kentucky

Two federal courts recently (and only seemingly, I would contend) ruled on the side of online travel companies, producing somewhat surprising results in a long line of similar cases we followed throughout 2009 (see here, here, here, here, and here).  One, a case brought to the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, by Monroe [...]

The Top 5 + 1 Sales & Use Tax Court Opinions of 2009

In an attempt to make sense of the plethora of sales & use tax cases in court in 2009, here is the Sales Tax Buzz Top 5 +1 Sales & Use Tax Court Opinions of 2009 List, as well as a little commentary on each, while we round the bend to close another solar year:  [...]

Florida’s AG Files Against Expedia & Orbitz for Hotel Sales Taxes

Are Expedia and Orbitz paying the appropriate amount of sales taxes to the State of Florida for online-purchased hotel room rentals? Not according to Florida’s Attorney General Bill McCollum, who recently filed suit in Tallahassee for up to hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes. In a line of online travel cases that essentially [...]

NYC Speaks to the Online Hotel Booking Issue

In ongoing Sales Tax Buzz coverage of online hotel room booking services (see here, here, here, and here), New York City’s Department of Finance recently weighed in on the issue in a first memorandum (a second is scheduled to follow later this month) addressing the recently revised rules surrounding hotel room occupancy tax there. Effective [...]

ISO Unpaid Hotel Occupancy Taxes, This Time In Georgia

As local jurisdictions are searching high and low for tax revenues, one area they continue to target is unpaid occupancy taxes and, in this vein, yet another online hotel booking company sales tax case has caught my attention, this time coming out of the state of Georgia. For earlier Sales Tax Buzz discussions on this [...]

Hoteliers, Online Hotel Bookers

Just like almost everybody I know, I shop for the best hotel rate when I plan to visit other cities, for personal and for corporate travel alike. Of the many sites I scope, I’ve used Expedia, Hotels.com, and Orbitz often enough to bookmark them. That’s why various cases (one, among several, in the U.S. District [...]