The long lead times for issuing passports cost travel agencies around 150 million euros in losses. This is the alarm of Assoviaggi-Confesercenti whose associates have received a rain of cancellations, as many as 80 thousand. A rampant phenomenon that spares no province. In fact, the Passport offices of the police headquarters are inundated with a flood of requests after the resumption of long-haul travel. The absence of the document entails the cancellation and to date the agencies have received 80 thousand.
The numbers of the crisis
A phenomenon that spares no operator. 96.5% of companies report problems, and have seen the time required to be able to make an appointment to issue a passport in their own province rise from just over two weeks to over five weeks. A chaos that has led to cancellations and missed bookings or postponements to a later date by travellers: 39.7% of companies report having seen up to 10 individual or group trips vanish, 46.1% between 10 and 30; but there is also 10.6%, who report that they have lost over 30. Overall, an average of 7 per agency have been lost, for approximately 13 thousand euros of sales not made.
《First of all, it is a disservice to citizenship: the passport is not only needed to go on vacation, but also for family reunification, work, for children who do not have one. In short, it is not just a question of business, but also of the right to freedom of movement outside the European borders. However, it is undeniable that the problem also has a serious impact on the world of organized tourism, precisely in the year of the restart after the long stop imposed by the pandemic where Italy was the last country in Europe to eliminate travel restrictions – reports Gianni Rebecchi, National President of Assoviaggi -. The reasons for the current chaos are the sum of new requests and those “backlog” due to Covid. Now, however, we need to find a solution that cannot be Open Days, which inevitably turn into new traffic jams. It is necessary to accelerate the technological investments of the PA: greater IT efficiency is needed which in the case of personal documents must follow the example of the digital national registry, the main road to improving services to citizens in a European country.
A problem that without radical interventions month after month is destined to worsen as the long Easter weekend and the summer holidays approach.