Hotel tax collections provide an indication of the economic impact of hosting a major basketball tournament.
The Kansas Department of Revenue has released transient guest tax collections for March 2018. This is a tax added to hotel bills in addition to sales tax. The rate in Kansas is 6.00 percent, although some localities add additional tax to that.
For the city of Wichita, here are the collections:
March 2017: $538,539
March 2018: $543,844
Increase: $5,305 or 0.99 percent
With the hotel tax at 6.00 percent, that increase implies additional sales of $88,417 for the same month of the prior year. (The 2.75% tourism fee that is also added to Wichita hotel bills is paid directly to the city, so it does not appear in the statistics from the Kansas Department of Revenue.)
While an increase from the same month of the previous year is good, the average monthly hotel tax collections for the year before (March 2017 through February 2018) was $590,770.
So March 2018 didn’t exceed the average month of the previous year. It also didn’t exceed March 2016. Whatever was happening in Wichita during that month, the city generated $665,854 in hotel taxes.
Kansas transient guest tax collections are available in an interactive visualization here.
