Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Did Juneau There's No Sales Tax on Cruise Ships While in Town?

After lots of discussion, Juneau's Assembly (city council) has agreed to exempt cruise ships from charging and collecting sales tax while they are in port in Juneau. We earlier reported that for the most part, cruise lines ignored collecting the tax, but the reason the city was considering eliminating it was that no other cities had laws on the books that required the cruise lines to collect sales tax so Juneau didn't ever want the cruise lines to get nervous about it reroute ships to avoid it. During the discussion, it came out that only one (unnamed) cruise line was actually collecting and remitting the tax. There was a faction that wanted to eliminate the tax because it would help the city appear “business-friendly” to the cruise lines.

The complete story appeared in the March 7 edition of Cruise News Daily.