Home News Latvia Introduces a Tourism Fee for Each Night

Latvia Introduces a Tourism Fee for Each Night

Tourists visiting Riga will be charged €1 per night spent in the capital, joining a long list of European capitals that have implemented the measure in the last year.

However, according to local media, tourists who stay in Latvia for an extended period of time are exempt from the fee. The €1 fee will be waived after ten days in the country, according to SchengenVisaInfo.com.

Prior to Latvia, several popular European tourist destinations, including Rome, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Venice, which frequently dealt with mass tourism, implemented an entry fee for tourists.

The fee is calculated differently in different destinations, depending on factors such as the fixed rate of service prices, calculations for tourist accommodation categories, the season of the visit, or whether the fee can be applied for each overnight stay. In neighboring Lithuania, a tourist tax was implemented in the Kaunas region in 2016 and in the capital city of Vilnius in 2018.

According to the city, the fee revenue will be used to fund tourism-related projects and infrastructure development in order to promote Riga as an international destination.

The tourism fee was first discussed in 2019, with the measure set to go into effect in 2021. However, the decreasing number of tourists who followed Europe after the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the implementation of the measure.

Some changes have been made to the initial proposed regulation, the most significant of which is that children under the age of 18 will no longer be taxed, which was previously applicable to everyone over the age of 12.

Latvia received 291,161 arrivals in June, up from 112,989 in the previous quarter, according to CEIC. According to the data, Latvia had an all-time high of 706,611 arrivals in September of 2018, with the lowest rates recorded in the previous four years occurring in March of 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. During this period, a total of 22,485 people arrived in Latvia.

“In May 2022, non-residents accounted for 53 percent or 87,600 guests hosted by tourist accommodation establishments, which is 6.4 times more than in May 2021,” according to the CBS, Latvia’s Central Statistical Bureau.

The majority of tourists recorded in May came from Lithuania (12,600), Estonia (10,600), Germany (9,700), the United Kingdom (6,800), Finland (4,100), the United States (3,900), and Poland (3,700). Furthermore, Riga (78.3 percent), Jrmala (7.7 percent), and Liepja were their top three destinations (2.4 percent).

 

 

 

Source : schengenvisainfo