The game of gotcha between U.S. cities and the online travel agencies continues and it's almost a full-time job just trying to keep tabs on the whole thing.
It sort of reminds me of my visit to the Orbitz TLC Center last week, where about nine people, including three former air traffic controllers, were on duty, monitoring plasma screens filled with gridlocked jets and typhoons.
Somewhere, undoubtedly, a team of lawyers is hunkered down in a corporate boardroom, monitoring a torrent of hotel-tax motions, city audits and new ordinances across the country.
Anyway, here's what's been going on in the last few weeks as municipalities seek to force the OTAs to pay occupancy taxes on retail rates when they sell hotel rooms on a merchant basis, and the OTAs fight back.
Orbitz quietly has ceased selling hotel stays on a merchant-model basis in Lawrence County, Pa., after the county sued the OTAs over the hotel-tax issue. Orbitz Worldwide spokesman Brian Hoyt says in practice the city that's most-impacted is New Castle, Pa., (population around 26,000), which does the lion's share of hotel business in the county.
Orbitz and other OTAs like Expedia and Travelocity are pursuing a scorched-earth policy against some municipalities that have irked the OTAs and sued them over hotel taxes. The OTAs have ceased selling hotel rooms in Columbus, Ga., for instance, as the Georgia Supreme Court certified the city's hotel tax ordinance, agreeing it had the right to collect hotel taxes on the retail rate from the OTAs.
But, you'll notice that the OTAs are reserving their wrath for the little guys like Columbus, Ga., and New Castle, Pa.
None of the OTAs has dropped out of New York City, which instituted a new law in September that specifically targets "room re-marketers" like the OTAs for higher occupancy taxes. And, the OTAs, too, are still marketing rooms in Anaheim, Calif., and San Francisco, where legal decisions so far have been adverse.
In the latest setback for the OTAs, the Georgia Supreme Court, the state's highest court, ruled this week that hotels.com is liable for hotel taxes on the retail rate and not merely on the net rate that it had been remitting. The ruling follows a similar ruling by that court on Expedia's tax status in June.
So the major OTAs, have dropped out of Columbus, Ga., and the city apparently is feeling the pain of lost tax revenue.
In retaliation, the City of Columbus has taken the novel and seemingly dubious approach of filing a motion in a lower court, seeking an injunction to force Expedia to renew its marketing of merchant hotel rooms in the city.
The Interactive Travel Services Association, a trade group which represents OTAs and GDS, rightfully was all over that one, and issued the following statement:
"Apparently some lawyers never learned the principles of a free market. By their Alice-in-Wonderland logic, if your first lawsuit scares a business away, why not file another to try to force them to stay? We hope and expect the court will agree that companies should be allowed to decide when and where they want to do business."
But, dropping out of a small city or county here and there doesn't ease the headache for the OTAs as they battle localities large and small across the nation.
For example, this week Florida's Pinellas County reportedly decided to hire an attorney to look into suing the OTAs to cough up some additional tourism taxes.
Pinellas County should get in line because it undoubtedly won't be the last to crank up its legal team as this five-year-old hotel tax battle continues.
I have boxes full of lawsuits to prove it.