Would the major online platforms be afflicted by the same malady that struck Thomas Thévenoud, the ephemeral Secretary of State in charge of Foreign Trade, Tourism Promotion and French people abroad?
Can’t you see it? I’m talking here about the administrative phobia! At the time, he hadn’t declared his income…
One wonders if this anxiety disorder might be at the origin of Booking and its peers’ partial settlement of the tourist tax.
Booking, since it is this company in question, has just suffered another judicial setback.
The travel giant was condemned, in the dispute with the metropolis of Nancy, for failures related to the tourist tax. This is not the first case! Last year already, Booking was forced to pay €574,000 for unpaid tourist taxes to the Oléron community…
And this legal defeat could invite more, since the American giant would be facing a rain of lawsuits brought by French local authorities, says La Lettre, which has investigated the subject.
What goes without saying is all the more true when stated: the hole in the racket concerns here non-professional landlords, for whom the platform is responsible for collecting the tax.
Can’t you see it? I’m talking here about the administrative phobia! At the time, he hadn’t declared his income…
One wonders if this anxiety disorder might be at the origin of Booking and its peers’ partial settlement of the tourist tax.
Booking, since it is this company in question, has just suffered another judicial setback.
The travel giant was condemned, in the dispute with the metropolis of Nancy, for failures related to the tourist tax. This is not the first case! Last year already, Booking was forced to pay €574,000 for unpaid tourist taxes to the Oléron community…
And this legal defeat could invite more, since the American giant would be facing a rain of lawsuits brought by French local authorities, says La Lettre, which has investigated the subject.
What goes without saying is all the more true when stated: the hole in the racket concerns here non-professional landlords, for whom the platform is responsible for collecting the tax.
Could we, then, do whatever we want when it comes to the tax?
The liberties taken by the major online platforms in applying the tourist tax are not new.Already in 2019, another platform, Airbnb, indulged by charging clients an amount for children who are normally exempt. The fault, according to Airbnb, lay with its IT system not adapted to this tax collection. We are talking about a leading tech company… spot the error…
More recently, in July 2026, Airbnb quietly changed the basis of its June disbursements… a sleight of hand that drastically reduced the amounts traditionally allocated to local authorities and, at the same time, provided a little liquidity to the home-hosting champion…
Could we, then, do whatever we want regarding the tax?
The state is indeed preparing a reform project for the tourist tax, but one can hardly say there is unanimous consent. Professionals and local authorities oppose centralization by the state (via the Directorate General of Public Finances, DGFiP), the end of earmarking the amounts for the tourism sector, and the proportional scale.
The reform also includes the section “sanctions and guarantees” which aims to tighten the legal framework to force intermediaries to remit all amounts collected on time.
An experiment has indeed been put in place through the FARITAS tool (Facilitate the collection of tax and tourist tax). This platform allows, each semester, to file with the tax administration a single declaration on the tourist tax collected covering the entire national territory, avoiding OTAs having to fill several non-standardized forms for each local authority.
Should we return to collection by the host, as before 2019? The new tools for registering non-professional rentals (Loi Le Meur and the European regulation on short-term rentals, ed.), would make it more controllable, but the burden would fall to local authorities, who have delegated precisely due to lack of resources.
Defending a local management therefore requires harmonizing declarations, respecting deadlines, and sanctions that should not rely solely on litigation. All the more so since France is today looking for every euro to fill its coffers.
Administrative phobia can be treated, but the remedy lies with the legislator and with the cooperation of the entire supply chain… !
Published by Céline Eymery Editor-in-Chief – TourMaG.com See all articles by Céline Eymery
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