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Post by mambo on Jan 7, 2006 14:19:58 GMT 1
No, but which European country depends so heavily (the economy that is) on tourism ?
If you put an advertisement sign, without a license, outside your shop in Germany you will get a fine.
If you put some chairs outside your bar in Amsterdam, so that your guests can enjoy the sun, you will get a fine.
If you put your garbage container on the street a few hours too soon you will get a 40 euro fine in Holland.
If you sell homemade wine in Italy without a license you will get a fine.
If a home owner does not pay the tourist tax in Austria he will also get a fine.
In other words, each country has rules and regulations and most of them we don't like at all, but since they are legal regulations you will have to abide by them.
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Post by Nicola on Jan 7, 2006 16:23:52 GMT 1
Rules are fine but they have to be balanced by sense. The Min of Tourism are spending huge amounts of money marketing Croatia to the world to encourage us to visit. In very simple terms however, I am unable to 'bring' potentially 10 different families into the country to spend their money on Croatian tourism (and pay tourist tax). Because of this I will no longer be able to employ local Croatian contractors/property managers etc. It can't all be quantified by the presence of a licence.
No-one's disputing the need for licences, only the complexity of the system to apply for one. It's a shame but given the confusion around this, I for one am not confident I could actually navigate the system without error. Looks like our only option is to withdraw...
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Post by mambo on Jan 8, 2006 1:47:10 GMT 1
Problem is of course that too much money goes outside the country without having been taxed at all.
All Croatians pay tax on their income from letting rooms and the foreigners pay...........zilch.
And if you take a look e.g. in Istria you will find that a huge part of the new apartments are either build by foreigners, sold by foreigners to foreigners and none of them want to pay tax on anything (which I can understand by the way).
I can understand that the goverment wants to stop this, because there is a good chance that they will be forced to allow Italians to buy in Croatia. If that happens than we will get more ghostcities and that is not exactly what we are waiting for. We already have quite a few, you should come and take a look.
And to navigate the system probably requires a local lawyer or real estate agent who knows the rules. Knowing how slow the system works in Croatia many people can simply forget about getting a license in time. Here they count in years (not in days, weeks or months) to get a license.
It's a bloody disgrace, but that is the way they work.
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Post by sarah1 on Jan 8, 2006 12:39:06 GMT 1
One point about the visitors tax is that everyone has to pay it - it is not restricted to just foreigners. For example, when my husband goes to visit relatives at their houses he is technically supposed to go and register at the local tourist office and pay a visitors tax.
Plus from our experience of getting a license, and from my experience of helping friends to get this license who have brought properties in Croatia, it is not so difficult. Yes, there are lots of little bits of paper that you need, but the nearest tourist office should explain what papers you need to get, and then come to do an inspection of the property to give it a category. These categories operate on a star system depending on the facilities at the property. It certainly did not take years to get - rather it took a few weeks. And this was without any 'help' from veze [connections]....
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