The executive committee of the South India Hotels and Restaurants' Association, which met at Visakhapatanam on Saturday, urged the southern States to give more incentives to the hotel industry and also to provide land for setting up hotels at cheaper rates, as land costs have become prohibitive.

Mr K. Syama Raju, the president of the association, said it was becoming increasingly difficult to set up hotels either in the budget segment or in the luxury segment, due to the ever-rising land costs, crippling taxes and unreasonable policies with regard to sale of liquor.

“It is universally agreed that we need to have many more hotels in all segments to give a boost to the tourism industry, but the policies of the Government in all States run contrary to the stated objective. Shanghai has more number of hotels than the whole of India and it is difficult to imagine how tourism can be promoted in such a situation,” he remarked.

He said extension of bar timings, imposition of a uniform VAT, relaxation of the very stringent food safety norms and applicability of luxury tax on the actual room tariff as against the present norm of applying it on published tariffs as in Tamil Nadu were some of the demands made by the association. He said power tariffs in many States were also proving to be very burdensome.

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