Court Opinion

ID: 9853972
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:58:37.756102+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:24.688116
License: Public Domain

HUNSTEIN, Presiding Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent to the majority’s opinion. As the majority acknowledges, neither it nor the trial court has found Expedia to be an innkeeper or operator under the City’s “Hotel-Motel Occupancy Excise Tax” ordinance. Accordingly, when Expedia sells to persons who ultimately occupy motel or hotel rooms in the City, Expedia does so not as an innkeeper but as a private party who, under the plain language of the ordinance, is not subject to the ordinance’s terms. As an entity other than an innkeeper, Expedia is thus indistinguishable, as far as the City’s ordinance is concerned, from the persons who ultimately use the rooms. Until Expedia is legally determined to be an innkeeper or operator under the City’s ordinance, there is no legal basis to treat the rooms Expedia obtains at a lower cost by contract from the City’s hotels any different from a room obtained by a tourist who presents herself at a hotel and personally negotiates a lower rate. The tax calculation is based on the rental of the room by the innkeeper. What Expedia or the tourist chooses to do with the room after completing the transaction with the innkeeper is a matter not covered by the ordinance. Hence, in terms of the ordinance itself, it does not matter that Expedia resells what it purchased from the innkeeper; Expedia is not different from the tourist who, after renting a room, hands the key over to a traveller in the parking lot in exchange for reimbursement and a fee. The City’s ordinance simply does not govern transactions between a non-innkeeper entity like Expedia and the users of the rooms, who occupy the rooms but do not pay the hotel and instead pay Expedia.
Nor is there any legal significance under the City’s ordinance to the fact that the contract between Expedia and the hotels makes the hotels the parties responsible for arranging the payment from Expedia’s clients. The tax due under the ordinance is imposed on the transaction between innkeeper and room purchaser, not on any transaction between the room purchaser and third parties, even if the hotel (pursuant to contract) thereafter facilitates the transaction with the third parties. While the City may be authorized to amend its ordinance to encompass transactions such as the ones at issue here, those transactions clearly do not come within the ambit of the ordinances as currently formulated.
Accordingly, because I would recognize that Expedia is paying tax based upon the properly calculated sum due under the ordinance, i.e., the amount Expedia is charged for the rooms it obtains from the hotels, and that this amount is then properly remitted by the hotels to the City, I would reverse the trial court’s ruling on the issue.
*693Decided June 15, 2009 —
Reconsideration denied June 30, 2009.
Buchanan & Land, Jerry A. Buchanan, Benjamin A. Land, Jones Day, Edward K. Smith, Robin A. Schmahl, for appellant.
Pope, McGlamry, Kilpatrick & Morrison, Neal K. Pope, Charles N. Pope, Michael L. McGlamry, Paul Kilpatrick, Jr., William U. Norwood III, Wade H. Tomlinson III, Bryan, Cave, Powell & Gold-stein, Robert M. Travis, John R. Bielema, Jr., for appellee.