The new Swedish travel guarantee system has been met with harsh criticism from the industry for driving up costs for both companies and consumers. Now several major tour operators have had enough and moved their travel guarantee to Denmark.
”"The new travel guarantee only has losers. The consequences are that travel becomes more expensive while we give away consumer protection to other countries," says Emanuel Karlsson, CEO of Rolfs Flyg & Buss, one of the companies that has now moved its travel guarantee from Kammarkollegiet to the Danish Travel Guarantee Fund.
The background is new rules for travel guarantees that came into effect on April 1st of this year. This means that tour operators pay a fee to a collective fund that is supposed to protect travelers if a trip cannot be carried out.
The fee corresponds to 0.6 percent of the companies' annual turnover. For Rolfs Flyg & Buss, this means a cost of SEK 10 million per year.
”There is a lot of money in an industry where the players have low margins,” says Emanuel Karlsson.
He believes that companies that choose to keep travel guarantees in Sweden are passing the cost directly onto consumers.
TUI Sweden and the German Apollo owner Dertour Nordic have also moved their travel guarantees to Denmark.
Björn Olsson, an administrator at Kammarkollegiet, writes in an email that the authority has not encountered any major reactions from the industry, but that some companies have expressed dissatisfaction with having to both pay a fee to the fund and arrange an individual travel guarantee.
The Swedish Agency for Administrative and Financial Affairs has no information about Swedish customers' experiences of travel guarantee cases in Denmark, but states that the authority's contact with the Travel Guarantee Fund has worked well and that travelers should feel safe even with the Danish solution.
Björn Olsson estimates that 10–15 larger companies in the industry have moved their travel guarantees to Denmark., and Emanuel Karlsson estimates that the moved travel guarantees correspond to just over half of the total guarantee amount.
Emanuel Karlsson believes that the new rules are a blunt way of trying to strengthen consumer protection and that they rather open up the way for unscrupulous actors to enter the market.
”"It is not reasonable that we, who take responsibility for our own business risks, should be forced to pay for others who do not take that responsibility," he says.
Source: DI.SE
