Highgate reaches new heights with Avalara for Hospitality

Highgate is a hotel management, investment, and development firm with over 87,000 rooms under management across North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

“We’ve grown substantially in recent years, with two acquisitions happening in that timeframe. Our ability to automate is vital to increasing efficiencies and managing the company’s growth,” says Andrew Greco, Highgate’s VP of Compliance and Taxation.

Manually consolidating data to determine tax obligations for hotels or hotel management companies via their back-end systems is a time-consuming process. “It’s difficult to keep up with the multiple tax laws across the state, city, and local jurisdictional levels,” says Andrew. “Any misunderstanding of tax rules would be costly. Especially since many local tax jurisdictions are strict when it comes to compliance and aggressive when they audit.”

Staffing challenges and inconsistent data also contribute to this segment’s tax compliance complexities. These challenges are exacerbated when there are multiple brands of hotels with their own systems of record. “Before working with Avalara, our process was very expensive, complex, and rife with manual processes,” recalls Andrew.

“Avalara dominates the industry and their experience serving the hotel segment was clear,” Andrew explains. “Other vendors didn’t have tax content comparable to what Avalara for Hospitality offers specifically for the hotel industry. No one was even close to offering something comparable. Even the other big players in the space didn’t have a fully functioning solution for transaction tax specifically related to hotels.”