Two of the main Colombian cities have presented significant falls in hotel occupancy figures, these are Bogotá and Medellín. As announced by the Hotel and Tourism Association of Colombia (Cotelco), the effects of the exemption from income tax on profits from new hotels will be analyzed.
The president of that association, Juan Leonardo Correa, indicated that the tax exemption law that was established in 2003 and which exempts profits from services provided in new hotels for 30 years from the payment of income tax should be reviewed.
The official did not hide his concern about the low occupancy in the two aforementioned cities, where the fall has been around six percentage points. While in June of last year the occupancy in the capital's hotels reached 65.6%, in June of this year it reached only 59.5%.
"We don't want a good thing to bring a perverse effect; the idea is to make a study of the situation together with the government," Correa said during the National Congress of the Hotel Industry, which is held in Cartagena.
"When this law was proposed, the construction of 14,000 rooms was calculated, and we are already at 22,000, throughout the country. We estimate that at this rate we would reach 32,000 more by 2017, the year in which the validity of the law ends," he explained.
In this way the supply has turned out to be higher than the demand, for example Bogotá will have 3,318 more rooms in the next two years and Medellín will have 1,200 more in the same period of time.
