Morocco Scraps Tourist Tax, Sparking Debate on Industry Recovery and Fairness

No more tourist production tax for 2020 and previous years. Tourism professionals who are already up to date see this decision in a bad light, as it clearly only benefits those who do not pay it, reports L’Économiste. There are several reasons behind this exemption. First, the health crisis related to the coronavirus, which has had a negative impact on several sectors of activity. Then, the administrative difficulty related to the collection of this tax.

Many tourism professionals who regularly pay this tax, set at 15 dirhams for hotels classified in the luxury category and 11 dirhams for 5-star hotels and first-class guest houses and 8 dirhams for second-class guest houses, believe that the ideal would have been for this amnesty to only take into account the current year. Since it had already been applied to customers in previous years.

Some tourism professionals would have preferred a change in the method of calculating the tourist production tax and the municipal accommodation tax based on the monthly turnover of the establishment instead of the overnight stay, analyzes the same source.