Many States and Cities Target Travelers With Taxes
Plan your trips accordingly
Hate airline fees? Check your tab, because travelers are also being nickeled-and-dimed by additional taxes being imposed by states and cities.
Visitors to Fort Lauderdale and Honolulu, for example, typically spend about $22 a day on extra taxes on hotels, meals and rental cars. But that's far less than if they went to Chicago, where state and local hospitality taxes total more than $40 a day, according to a report from the Global Business Travel Association, a trade group.
Even staying in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. is cheaper than Chicago's combined 16 percent tax on a hotel room and 20 percent tax on a car rental, the association's data show.
Travel is big business for states. Florida visitors, for instance, spent nearly $67 billion in 2010, the latest information available, and generated nearly $10 billion to federal, state and local governments, according to new state-by-state figures from the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group.