OECD Reviews of Digital Transformation: Going Digital in Colombia by OECD

Author:OECD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: employment/education/regions/governance/industry/science
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Published: 2019-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

The digital economy and regulatory changes are boosting accommodation services

Employment in the accommodation sector grew by about 5.8% on average in each year between 2014 and 2017 (Figure 4.5). Data from the Observatory of the Digital Economy (MinTIC) suggests that digital transformation is likely to have driven part of this dynamic. The sector aggregate encompassing accommodation and food services, while overall still not a very intensive user of mature digital technologies relative to other sectors,3 has seen relatively large increases in terms of digital intensity between 2015 and 2017, in particular among micro-enterprises and SMEs (Figure 4.7). This is not surprising given the ease with which in particular small hotel or restaurant owners today can set up their website or make an appearance on specialised online platforms.

The accommodation sector likely will further profit from recent regulatory adjustments that the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism (Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo [MinCIT]) introduced to simplify the formal registration of private accommodation service providers. While private persons previously were obliged to fulfil the same requirements as hotels in order to be registered in the National Tourism Registry, the new legislation has established an additional category for non-commercial service providers that simplifies registration in the National Tourism Registry (Decree 2063) and does not require registration in the Registry of Merchants (Decree 2119). Through this measure, MinCIT aims to reduce the high share of tourism service providers estimated to be operating in informality (41%) and to better account for the offer of rooms via peer-sharing platforms. While providers of accommodation services are, in principle, still obliged to pay a tax on their generated income, a threshold of 50 times the legal minimum wage reduces the burden for small-scale providers (El Espectador, 2018b).

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