Dining out in air conditioned restaurants will become costlier due to the increased tax rate of 19.5% which consist of 14.5% value added tax stipulated in the state budget and 5% service tax as stated in the union budget, coming into effect from April 1.<\/p>\n
The service tax applies to the total bill amount and not on individual food items. Many restaurants in Trivandrum city said that they had not started taking the additional service tax as mentioned in the central budget due to some confusion over whether the rates applied to A\/C and non-A\/C areas in the hotel.<\/p>\n
“The guidelines that came from the finance department stated that if any part of a restaurant had A\/C facility, the service charge should be extended to all areas including the non-A\/C part of the hotel.” says Sudheesh Kumar, President Kerala Hotel and Restaurant Association<\/p>\n
Calicut has taken the lead in hiking the rates compared to Trivandrum and Kochi. “The rates will vary from Rs 20 to Rs 30 on various dishes. A meal which costs Rs 85 will now cost Rs 105” said a restaurant owner. However hotel owners in Kochi said that they are not going to impose the new tax rate for a month. Many restaurants have removed air conditioners to avoid the high tax rate.<\/p>\n
During the budget Finance Minister P. Chidambaran said that they will hold a meeting of hoteliers\u2019 associations of various states on April 14 to find a solution to the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dining out in air conditioned restaurants will become costlier due to the increased tax rate of 19.5% which consist of 14.5% value added tax stipulated in the state budget and 5% service tax as stated in the union budget, coming into effect from April 1. The service tax applies to the total bill amount and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[35,452],"class_list":["post-9370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-kerala","tag-trivandrum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9370"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}