Checking out a hotel room can sometimes give you a shock similar to the ice-cold rain pouring down in the middle of so-called summer months – the additional fees seeming to add themselves onto the end of every bill like a rabbit out of a hat during a magic trick.

Hotels in Jasper, though, seem to have relatively the same tax across the board.

For starters, every hotel in Alberta has a tourism levy. That’s a four per cent tax on all visitor accommodation that goes towards Travel Alberta. 

“We promote Alberta as a tourist destination regionally, nationally, and internationally to increase the number of visitors to and within Alberta,” reads their website.

Another tax, a staple of just about everything in the country, is the Goods and Services Tax (GST) – this one is five per cent and is added on all accommodation.

For the town of Jasper, much like other towns and cities, there is a specific Destination Marketing Fee (DMF) added onto the bill of many hotel rooms. The DMF (as it will probably appear on a bill) is a fee of two per cent that goes towards marketing Jasper, as a destination, to a variety of audiences.

This fee, unlike the tourism levy and the GST, may or may not apply to your room depending on where you decide to stay.

For example, the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge and the Sawridge Inn and Conference Centre both apply this fee to your bill.

Visitors who stay at one of these, or one of the other ten hotels that collect the fee, also get charged extra GST on top of the usual five per cent.

As the DMF is not a tax, but instead a fee being charged by the hoteliers, the federal government will tax that fee. 

Consequently, if a guest is paying $299.00 for a room, Jasper’s DMF would cost an extra $5.08 and the GST charged on that would be about 30 cents. Of course, visitors will still be paying the five per cent GST ($14.95) and 4 per cent tourism levy $11.96), so the total rate would be about $332.19.