Morocco to apply taxes to Airbnb and Booking.com

Morocco is looking forward to limit the services of Airbnb and Booking.com, online marketplace and hospitality platforms, in an attempt to «level the playing field» for traditional hotels, said Bloomberg on Tuesday.

Moroccan officials will apply taxes and regulations on online portal Airbnb, starting form 2019, making up for the damages more than 3,800 hotels and hundreds of travel agencies have been suffering from lately, said Mehdi Taleb, head of regulation, development and quality at Morocco’s Tourism, Air Transport and Social Economy Ministry.

Undercover hotel inspectors alongside tax officials and ministry informants will work together to implement the new decision. Meanwhile, the government will offer local online travel platforms «attractive packages» to meet the needs of tourists and provide similar services as global online firms like Booking.com.

The new initiative is part of Morocco’s attempts to face «a new reality which is distorting visibility for our tourism development strategies,» said Taleb.

By adopting such decision, Morocco becomes one of the countries that have decided to apply taxes to online marketplace and hospitality platforms such as Airbnb. In the Kingdom almost 20, 000 people are using Airbnb for their properties, making of the country the second to make use of the platform in Africa after South Africa.