City tax

City tax, tourist tax, occupancy tax, visitor levy, taxe de séjour, imposta di soggiorno: the name and the rules change from town to town. In some places the guest owes the tax and you collect it; in others the tax is yours and you may pass it on. Either way, the authority looks to you for the right amount. Charge too little and the difference comes out of your pocket; charge too much and you owe a guest a refund.

Every rule answers the same five questions: what is charged, who pays it, for how many nights, at which rate on which night, and whether VAT is added. Set up each tax so it gives those answers, show it on its own line before the guest pays, and keep the night-by-night figures your return asks for.

Alongside Solidres 4.4.0, eleven add-ons and the Lumina template have new releases. Three more add-ons now install as Joomla packages, the Hub and the invoices take up the new tourist tax, iCal sync stops losing imported dates when a download fails, the Experience booking form is rewritten, and Lumina now works in right-to-left languages.

Solidres 4.4.0 is out, and its headline is tourist tax. Until now a property had one tourist tax setting: an adult rate, a child rate and a night cap. That fitted some towns and not many others. It could not hold two levies, every new rate had to be typed in on the day it started, and two of its charge types did not compute what they promised.

In 4.4.0 tourist tax is a feature of its own, built into Solidres itself. The release also brings a set of booking and payment fixes, two security fixes, and pages that print properly from a device in dark mode.