Two weeks ago I wrote about Edinburgh's new visitor levy — 5% on the accommodation cost of a stay, capped at the first five consecutive nights, live since 24 July. My complaint then was disclosure: a mandatory charge most booking sites couldn't yet show. Two weeks on, I've been round the big booking names to see how each one is actually dealing with it. The answers range from "not our problem" to something I can only describe as slightly dodgy.
Booking.com: charges every night, refund optional
Booking.com's guidance to its hotels — on its partner help pages, updated this week, under the heading "Refunding anything over five consecutive nights" — says this, word for word:
"The Levy is capped at five consecutive nights, but our system can't collect it in that manner. That's why, regardless of the cap, we'll attribute 5% of your rate to the Levy for the whole duration of the guest's stay. Please consider refunding any extra amount to your guests at departure."
The cap is not a suggestion — it's how the council's scheme defines the tax. Levy is due on the first five consecutive nights and on nothing after them. Booking.com's system charges it on all of them anyway, knowingly, and the remedy on offer is that the hotel should *please consider* giving the difference back.
What that costs on a real stay: ten nights at £150 a night is £1,500 of accommodation. The levy actually due is 5% of the first five nights — £37.50. Booking.com attributes 5% of the whole stay — £75. Double the tax, and whether the extra comes back is now a decision for the front desk on a busy changeover Saturday.
It compounds. The same guidance admits the levy is calculated on the *whole nightly price* including extras: "Because our system combines your room rate and extras into a single nightly price, we'll calculate the Visitor Levy based on that total amount." The scheme is explicit that the levy applies to accommodation only — not breakfast, not parking. Book a £120 room with a £15 breakfast in the rate and you're paying tourist tax on the sausages.
To be fair about the mechanics: under the scheme it's the hotel, not Booking.com, that collects the levy and answers for it, filing quarterly and paying only what's actually due. The correct amount reaches the council either way — the city isn't pocketing the excess. The overcharge sits in the booking, between platform and property, until someone hands it back to the guest. Nobody's breaking a rule I can point to. But a system that over-collects a capped tax by design, in writing, and makes the correction voluntary? Slightly dodgy is the polite version.
Airbnb: doesn't touch it
Airbnb doesn't collect the levy automatically at all. Its help pages say the obligation sits with the host, and that "there are no systems in place that would allow Airbnb to automatically pay it on your behalf" — hosts add the levy to their pricing themselves and remit it. That has its own problems (my July note covered several, including exempt guests paying first and reclaiming later), but it can't silently over-collect a capped tax, because it doesn't pretend to compute it.
Hotels.com and Expedia: nothing published
Booking.com at least documents its shortcut in a public help article. From Expedia Group's brands — Hotels.com included — I could find no equivalent guidance at all on how, or whether, their systems apply the five-night cap or the accommodation-only base. Edinburgh hotels simply tell guests that on a prepaid third-party booking "you will pay the levy at the time you pay the third party". So if you book a long Edinburgh stay on Hotels.com, the honest answer to "was my levy capped correctly?" is: nobody has published one. Do the arithmetic yourself at checkout, same as below.
Trivago: whoever's behind the click
Trivago never touches the money — it's a comparison layer, and the price you click through to is another site's price, levy handling included. A metasearch can't refund what it never charged, and it inherits whatever the site behind the click got right or wrong. I'd know: local-hotel.com is a comparison site too, which is exactly why the only honest thing a comparison layer can do is *disclose* — say clearly what's payable at the property — rather than fold a tax it doesn't collect into a number it doesn't control.
If you're staying more than five nights in Edinburgh
- Work out what's actually due: 5% of the accommodation cost of your first five nights, before extras. On most bookings that's one line of arithmetic.
- If you booked on a site that charged levy across the whole stay, the difference is yours. Ask for it at departure — the property can refund it, and Booking.com's own partner guidance tells them to consider exactly that.
- If you're quoted the cap as news, the scheme is on the City of Edinburgh Council's website — five consecutive nights, accommodation cost only.
Where I stand
When the levy launched I argued that a council mandating a charge should mandate day-one disclosure in every booking channel. Two weeks in, the bar turns out to be lower than I thought: the biggest channel that *does* show the levy can't compute it the way the scheme defines it, and the next biggest doesn't say how it computes it at all. If a platform's systems can't apply a five-night cap — a cap that has been public since the scheme was set out — the honest options are to fix the system or to stop collecting the charge. Collecting too much by design and delegating the correction to "please consider" is neither.
On local-hotel.com, where a supplier sends us the levy on an Edinburgh rate we show it before you confirm, as a payable-at-the-property line, and we add no fees of our own on anything, ever. I'd rather show you a tax we can't perfectly itemise than charge you one that isn't due.
Nick, founder