Hotels to Collect Visitax Fee in Quintana Roo

Chetumal — Bernardo Cueto Riestra, Secretary of Tourism for the state of Quintana Roo, confirmed that the proposal for hotels, private lodging service providers, and platforms offering such services to be the collectors of the Foreign Visitor Fee known as Visitax remains firm.

The official stated that this is how the proposal considered in the Revenue Law stands and that some type of adjustment is being analyzed, although he did not specify what kind.

Last week, the Secretary of Tourism and the head of the Governor’s Office, Erick Arcila, had a meeting with the Mexican Caribbean Hotel Council, after which hoteliers said the state government had agreed to backtrack and seek other collection mechanisms after being explained the difficulties brought by the proposed collection model.

When asked about the proposal for hotels to be the collectors of the Visitax, Bernardo Cueto said that “for now, that is how the Revenue Law stands and it is being analyzed how there could be some type of adjustment,” but he did not specify what that would be.

“What the state government is proposing is a more effective collection that can benefit the tourism sector,” he affirmed, after recalling that the Visitax is a fee that was established since 2021.

He affirmed that what exists at this moment is constant dialogue about its application with the hotel sector, which showed its concern about the collection of the Visitax, but they hope that this fee can have the best effects in favor of Quintana Roo’s infrastructure.

It is worth mentioning that the direct collection of the Visitax at modules installed at Cancún Airport and through a website has not yielded the expected results because the annual collection goals are not met due to the majority of foreign tourists not paying it.

As an example, this year the state should have collected around 2 billion pesos from the Visitax by September, but by then it had only collected 288 million pesos, according to the financial statements of the Secretariat of Finance and Planning (Sefiplan).