ANAT rejects the changes proposed by the Ministry of Transport regarding the legislation on road transport and related activities

The National Association of Travel Agencies, ANAT, rejects the changes proposed by the Ministry of Transport regarding the legislation on the organization and performance of road transport and related activities, which it considers absurd, clientelistic, and impossible to apply. 

ANAT representatives claim that the measure severely affects all tourist transport and can have disastrous social consequences. Furthermore, it is deeply contrary to European market liberalization trends, as well as the Government’s agenda for the debureaucratization of the public apparatus.

ANAT is against the introduction of:

1. The obligation for road transport operators to complete waybills in duplicate for each trip before reporting it, and even requests the elimination of waybills – We specify that at this moment the European Commission is reviewing Regulation no. 1073 regarding common rules for access to the European market for buses and coaches, with the priority of market liberalization and the elimination of waybills within the European Union. They are not mandatory on Romanian territory for occasional transport either, as it is carried out based on an order or a contract, the proof being the advance payment of the transport or after the completion of the trip, according to the contractual clauses. 

2. The obligation that throughout the entire journey, in the case of occasional transport, the composition of the group must remain the same – This is a stupid and hilarious obligation, impossible to apply due to the countless situations that can arise during a tourist program and which will lead either to the disappearance of tourist programs that include land transport or to countless abuses by control bodies. Let’s just think of a few very frequent situations:

– tourist circuits, which collect tourists from several localities to participate in a common program and then drop them off in their localities of origin; 

– transfers of foreign tourists from an airport to various accommodation units in a certain tourist area;

– the situation in which a tourist is forced for personal reasons to leave a circuit before its conclusion. 

In any of these situations, the carrier and/or the organizer are at fault. A potential roadside check would consist of counting the passengers, identifying them, and comparing them with the carrier’s list. Nowhere in Europe does such a thing happen; Romania would be a first with such a situation. 

3. The obligation to complete the electronic form available on the Romanian Road Authority’s page with the identification data of the tourists 24 hours before the start of the journey, and requests the waiver of such reporting in the case of occasional trips or, as a last resort, maintaining the obligation to declare the trip before its start, but without a time limit and without requiring the identification data of the passengers – Such a measure would be catastrophic.

Let’s just think of a few possible situations: 

– the need to replace a broken-down coach during a tourist trip; 

– organizing an optional excursion in an area of tourist interest for part of a group of foreign tourists arriving in a Romanian port (their identity sometimes cannot be known until the start of the trip, and the distribution on coaches being done ad-hoc or, sometimes, being changed during the program); 

– the necessity of bringing passengers of an aircraft to Bucharest which, for various reasons, could not land at Otopeni, but at Craiova or Constanta; 

– one-day school trips, where participants can change until the moment of departure, etc. 

In addition, the proposed measure does not comply at all with EU Regulation no. 216/679 regarding the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data. 

As a professional and employer association of travel agencies, which actively promotes tourist transport and tourism with buses and coaches as safe, friendly, ecological, efficient, and accessible means for everyone, ANAT requests the Ministry of Transport: 

1. The liberalization of national road passenger transport in Romania through rules and not through chaos, following the model of European states that have liberalized their national road passenger transport market, such as Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy.

2. Supplementing Romanian legislation with clear provisions for the application of Regulation 1370/2007 regarding public rail and road passenger transport services. In the event of the approval of the normative act in the form proposed by the Ministry of Transport, similar to the one announced in October 2016, ANAT considers that we will witness the blocking of tourist transport carried out by Romanian carriers, with influences difficult to quantify both in terms of tourist circulation in Romania and on the activity of many carriers.