Taxes must be paid; by alternative hospitality, too?

…. once upon a time there was the hotel, I mean, just the hotel in its various forms, including guest houses, rented rooms, and so on – facilities that were subjected to administrative and public security rules.
With the evolution of the hospitality concept, short-term apartment rentals started to take hold, and in this case, too, considering the scale of the business, measures were taken to regulate it by introducing, the CAV (holiday homes and apartments) and RTA (tourist hotel residence) categories.
Another worthwhile action was the creation and regulation of the of the “diffused hotel” model in many places of interest whose scale was best suited by a distributed supply of tourist facilities.
And what has happened so far with leases as alternative hospitality – such a prominent phenomenon that the number of units on offer in Milan is higher than the number of hotel rooms?
Finally (and for once we cannot but agree with taxation) it has been decided by the latest government decree to apply a 21% flat-rate tax on transactions executed on platforms such as Airbnb for leases shorter than 30 days.
What is new, considering that taxes were to be paid even before? The difference lies in the fact that lease brokering companies have now become tax withholding agents, and in this way the majority of leases, which are in fact handled through them, will be immediately identifiable, and the relevant revenues will be reduced by 21% in favour of the internal revenue.
We applaud this measure, not so much to second the protest raised by Bernabò Bocca (the President of Federalberghi), who several times reiterated that, in the absence of adequate taxation effects, this type of hospitality constitutes unfair competition, but rather because we are aware of how difficult it is to impose virtuous behaviours in this country, when it comes to paying taxes.
In this sense we can say that, for better or worse, we are Italian, proudly, without remedy….