Reduced spending on items like Vacations and Restaurants is another sign that there is less spare cash in the economy. In other words, Chileans can’t afford these luxuries any more. But many still refuse to see the correlation between the ever-increasing costs involved in providing those services, and the prices they end up paying.
Reduced consumer spending is why the government collected 9% less IVA last year, a trend that looks to continue. Which is why they desperately want to get their hands on that AFP cash mountain in order to continue to mismanage the country.
I cannot understand why tourism “statistics” have always been wildly inflated, bearing little relation to reality. Even this article understates the true extent of the situation. Visitors are staying away in droves, even from the competencia desleal of informal rentals.
Yeah amazingly empty even on the usually mobbed central coast. Walked the main peatonal along the waterfront last Wednesday and very empty for this time period.
Local news reports that there were more illegal street vendors than tourists in the streets of San Antonio for the month of January.
It seems that the anticipation of the new “40 hour work week” implementation is making tourism in Chile less desirable, at least here in Punta Arenas, where planning for the new norm already results in closing things up when tourists need them to be open, revealing once again that Argentina has a better grip on providing for modern tourists than increasingly fading Chile.
Similarly, a few years ago, staff at the local Casino demanded that they be included in the obligatory feriados irrenuciables.
Didn’t seem to occur to them that just like restaurants, those public holidays are one of the periods of major demand. Or maybe they just enjoy making their employer suffer…
Since those feriados are paid like regular work days, it means that they get those days off without losing salary, a “win-win” result - for them, at least.
Its not just anturismo, its anti everything. Miserables.
Para financiar este aumento de recursos, se creará una tasa igual a 1,25% sobre el precio de los servicios de hospedaje en territorio nacional contratados por turistas extranjeros. Se incluirán plataformas digitales como Airbnb.
While international tourism is still below pre-pandemic levels:
La llegada de turistas extranjeros al país, al cierre de 2023, disminuyó un 17,4% en relación a los niveles de 2019.
Chile continues to classify visitors from Argentina as tourists. These days they probably represent the majority of legal entries into Chile.
But they mainly come to buy items that are cheaper here, sometimes returning home the same day after hitting the Malls and Supermarkets,
They are not exactly the type of tourists that bring money into the country, apart from what they spend in the shops.
And now the government wants to make their purchases tax-exempt, depriving the country of IVA, which is one of the few benefits that their visits bring.
As to the extra tax proposal wrt AirBnB, most short-stay apartments are not even tax-registered so the SII won’t find much extra revenue there, unless they start to crack down on this competencia desleal to find and force renters to declare IVA on their sales. Given the sheer size of this black economy, can’t see that happening.
Another complete waste of time and effort that will only impose more obligations on legal establishments, which are already going through a bad period, as mentioned at the start of this post.
I completely agree that this will just hurt the legally registered places, which is the last thing they need right now.
What is the rationale behind letting people from Argentina purchase tax free, while they want to keep increasing the taxes burden on those who live here? Oh, I forgot, there probably isn’t one.
This hotel, the Principado de Asturias, was wrecked during the 2019 riots, and never recovered:
“La zona de Santiago centro se encuentra muy afectada, hay muchos hoteles y oficinas que están con baja ocupación o en el extremo vacíos y cerrados, como era el caso de este hotel”, explicó la operadora.
Reduced tourist and business activity plus its now notoriously unsafe location made it inviable to reopen as a hotel.
