Open-Source

2 articles

Why Every Japan Booking Tool Reinvents the Same Accommodation Tax Logic (So We Open-Sourced Ours)

Every time I’ve talked to another operator or a developer building something for Japanese hospitality, the same complaint comes up: accommodation tax math. Not the concept — everyone understands “some cities tax overnight stays.” It’s the fact that local governments calculate it differently, and there is no single official, machine-readable national table that developers can safely drop into booking software without checking each local government’s ordinance and guidance.

Why We Open-Sourced a Japanese Accommodation Tax Calculator

Every few months I get the same message from another operator: “wait, how much accommodation tax am I supposed to be charging in [city]?” And every time, the honest answer is “it depends which city, which band, and whether you’re calculating off the room rate or the total price.” That inconsistency across Japan is annoying enough that we ended up writing code to solve it for ourselves — and then decided to open-source it.