The high prices of excursions and recreational classes every autumn give parents trouble. The agencies claim that they operate according to the rules, while parents doubt the real value of the arrangement. However, the state has created a system in which the agencies are clever, and the parents suffer the most
For the average citizen of Serbia, many things have become luxuries in the past few years. The real estate market has gone wild, the situation is no better with rent prices in bigger cities, and even try to go grocery shopping without looking at the prices and grabbing your pocket. The cost of living is a major problem for most of those whose incomes cannot keep up with the ever-increasing expenses. Although citizens from different countries are served a fairy tale about a life better than ever, an economic tiger and a quantum leap into the future - the reality of the average person is different.
Inflation is felt firsthand every fall by parents whose children return to school. Just after paying for textbooks, notebooks, backpacks, pencils, tempera, crayons and other school supplies, a new headache arrives - offers for trips, recreational classes and excursions, which the darlings bring to their parents, looking imploringly at them until the survey says: "Yes , I agree that my child goes…”.
HALF WAGE FOR A WALNUT
How far can 46.990 dinars take you? Parents of children in the first grade of a Belgrade elementary school will pay that much for seven days of recreational classes in Orašac, a village an hour's drive from Belgrade.
Officially, the average salary in Serbia for August 2024 was 96.649 dinars, according to the data of the Republic Institute of Statistics. Therefore, in order for their children to spend seven days in nature, parents will have to allocate almost half of an average salary.
It should, however, be emphasized right away: school trips and excursions have never been cheap. Part of the cost goes to the trip itself, but, apart from that, it is necessary to adequately equip and clothe the child, and give him some money for pocket money. On the other hand, there have never been so many complaints about the outrageous prices of school trips.
Ana Dimitrijević from the Forum of Belgrade High Schools tells "Vreme" that although the agency "absolutely has to have its own earnings", it is questionable what the parents' money is spent on.
"Why would they organize a trip without earning from it? However, I think that excursions in Serbia are very expensive. Abroad, when you look at the prices, you probably can't get it for less money. But when you calculate everything, one day in Serbia costs more than abroad. Agencies always justify it with something, but in general, it is very expensive for our circumstances. People don't live that well, and excursions are a big expense. Can it be cheaper? I think it can", believes Ana Dimitrijević.
POINTING THE FINGER
However, in order to find a way to make school trips cheaper, one must first find the culprit behind the high prices - a painstaking job in itself. Parents point the finger at the agencies or schools, the agencies claim that their costs are huge, while the schools refer to the regulations on conducting student trips, issued by the Ministry of Education. The result is a ball of accusations that is very difficult to find a beginning and an end.
The first step in planning student trips is undertaken by the school, which adopts a plan for recreational classes and excursions as part of the annual school plan. This plan is then approved by the Council of Parents, and sometimes part of the reason for the high price can be found in their wishes. This was confirmed for "Vreme" by some of the members of the Parents' Council of the aforementioned elementary school, who asked to remain anonymous.
"Sometimes parents really slip a bit in their demands and expect that within recreational classes or excursions, the children have an atmosphere as if they are on a luxury trip. What they would not ask for themselves, they expect their children to please when they go to school. I know that there have been cases before and it is required that the accommodation is not below four stars. Completely absurd", explains one parent for "Vreme".
However, although such requests have become a trend in recent years, they are still not common enough to be given absolute credit for the rising prices of arrangements.
When the plan is formed, public procurement is announced based on it. While the plan prescribes the location, duration and other elementary conditions of the trip, in public procurement they are specified. In the case of the trip to Orašac, for example, there were no big demands from the parents, but the conditions were, for the most part, reduced to what the Ministry's rulebook prescribes.
These are, among other things: transportation by buses of high tourist class (air conditioning, TV, DVD), which meet the conditions prescribed by the provisions of the Rulebook on the way of carrying out organized transportation of children, accommodation on the basis of six full boarders in the facility in Orašac, the whole group in one facility, escort a licensed tourist guide for each bus, services of a recreationist, services of a doctor - accompanying nature classes, insurance for all passengers, as well as childcare allowance for the head of the department, according to the decision of the Parents' Council in the net amount of 1000 dinars per child, per day of travel.
Based on these requirements, the school received an offer from an agency offering them accommodation in a four-star facility - for seven-year-old children. Which, among other things, has a swimming pool and a billiard room. In addition, the services included in the offer include, among other things, football, basketball, volleyball, "carrying children's luggage to the hotel and back" and a tour of a rural household.
THE SCHOOL DOES EVERYTHING ACCORDING TO THE LAW
After the public procurement has been announced, all that is left for the schools is to wait for the agencies' offers, after which a ranking list of bidders is formed. The school is obliged to choose the offer with the most favorable price, which at the same time meets all the conditions prescribed in the competition. Here, the interlocutors of "Vremena" point out, the school's hands are tied.
"After the whole process is over, if there are no complaints, the representative of the parents for the specific class attends the opening of the procurement for that class and states with his signature that the public procurement was done properly. Then a framework agreement is signed with the agency that is the best bidder. The agency then, based on the offer, sends a survey to the parents through the school, in order to see if the parents are interested in sending their children under those conditions. Each parent individually gives or does not give their consent to it", explains one mother.
She points out that this is an important moment in which parents' anger is often misdirected.
"Parents are often angry with the school when they receive such a high offer. However, the school is obliged to do so. She cannot decide not to forward to her parents an offer that has met the criteria of the competition. Parents could really react and reject it. And that's where we come to the problem that they often, painfully, because they don't want their children to stand out, accept everything", emphasizes the interviewee of "Vremena".
DOUBT ABOUT COMPETITION
And while the members of this Council of Parents point out that the blame should not be placed on the school, they at the same time doubt the honesty of the agencies themselves. As they explain to "Vreme", over time, based on their own experience and conversations with other parents, they began to wonder if there is real competition on the market.
"We have the impression that the agencies are actually organized among themselves and that they agree very well and share the market. They justify themselves by the increase in retail prices, inflation and the like, but here we have that the prices of excursions are rising disproportionately in relation to what is inflation and the cost of living in general", says one father and adds that on one occasion they had a case where three agencies sent completely the same offer.
"An anecdotal example is when we received an offer from three agencies for the same theater performance. Same day, same theater. The offers differ by 50 dinars, and they are identical to such an extent that there are the same typographical errors in them", he explains.
Ana Dimitrijević from the Forum of Belgrade High Schools shares a similar belief.
"In the last few years, it is a very common case that only one, possibly two, agencies contact us. We also think that the agencies have divided the field so that they don't jump into each other's shoes. And it always happens that ours, the one that comes in regularly, has a better offer. We are lucky that that agency is quite solid and the conditions and price are mostly correct", she says for "Vreme".
They have no tangible evidence for these claims other than personal impression and experience. They could possibly be checked by the Commission for the Protection of Competition. The Commission says to "Vreme" that until now there has been no initiative to examine the violation of competition in the school excursion market.
TAXES AND CONTRIBUTIONS
However, parents are not the only ones complaining about the high prices. Agencies have the same problem, which is the reason for the increase in the price of school trips by ten percent before the start of this school year. The main causes of the increase in the prices of the arrangements are, as they point out, the purchase prices of services that include travel, transportation, food, accommodation, but also many additional costs that are not common or do not exist in regular commercial jobs, and concern the mandatory application according to the rules of the ministry - doctor, animator, road leaders and the like, says Aleksandar Seničić. In addition, there are so-called freebies - for teachers, road guides, doctors, animators - that parents pay in the price of the arrangement.
A special stumbling block is always teachers' salaries, which range from 800 to 1.500 dinars per child, on which taxes and contributions are calculated. The agency must also pay an additional VAT of 20 percent on the net amount of daily wages.
Ana Dimitrijević, on the other hand, believes that the daily wage for teachers should not be a justification for extra arrangements.
"In the past, daily wages were paid to the school's account and were not taxed. First, we should ask ourselves why the state does not give us daily allowances, but parents do. Second, if that is already the case, why can't the per diems be paid into the school's account, in which case they would not be taxed? The fact is that when those per diems go through an agency, they have to pay a considerable amount of tax. Then those per diems cost them, that is, they reduce their earnings. Since they don't want their earnings to be lower, they increase the price of the excursion. And then it turns out that our per diems raise the price of the excursion. It is raised by the system that was created that way", emphasizes the interlocutor of "Vremena".
SOLIDARITY OF PARENTS
After all, it is perhaps the simplest - and at the same time the most difficult - to blame a wrongly established system. If the ball is such that you cannot find its beginning and end, it may be time to replace it with a new one. It is clear that neither the teachers nor the agencies are satisfied with the current setup, and especially not the parents, who, in the end, are the ones who put their hands deeper into their pockets every year.
First of all, maybe the state should start taking a smaller part of the cake, which would reduce the costs of the agencies, and therefore of the parents. On the other hand, if there really are "deals" between certain agencies that artificially, beyond the natural law of the market, increase the price of the arrangement, which the interlocutors of "Vremen" suspect, there are institutions that could investigate it.
The system, however, is notorious for being extremely slow to change. In the meantime, the only thing left for parents is solidarity.
"If we all refused as parents, maybe some things would change. If nothing else, maybe some things would at least be done more precisely, so we would have an insight into what we are actually paying", concludes the mother who, on principle, refused to send her seven-year-old daughter to 46.990 dinars recreational lessons.
Solidarity, for now, is still far away. Because, from the entire class - in which most parents were initially stunned by the price of the arrangement - only five children will not go to recreational classes.
As another problem, parents cite the fact that they often do not know where their money is going when paying for arrangements. The regulations of the Ministry of Education do not stipulate that the agency is obliged to provide parents with detailed specifications of costs, as well as what would be included in them.
The president of the National Association of Travel Agencies "Juta" Aleksandar Seničić tells "Vreme" that parents are involved in the entire process of deciding on the travel program, and that the acceptance of the offer is decided by the Commission, in which the representative of the parents in the School Council from a certain class is a mandatory member.
"The class teachers are obliged to present the travel plan to the parents, while their representative in the school council could and should have all the details. Most often, after choosing an agency, the agency is not required to forward all costs by item, although I have to say that this is not usual when dealing with commercial affairs. Of course, parents can request it and get that information through their representative in the Council of Parents, who is a member of the program selection committee and the agency that runs these travel programs," Seničić points out.
Parents, on the other hand, state that asking for an evaluative price list is often unfeasible in practice.
"We are mostly in Cejnot. They send us a survey to express our opinion within two days. We have tried several times to get a detailed specification of costs from the bidder, but even if it happens, it is not detailed enough. At that moment, you no longer have time for new requests, but it goes according to the principle - take it or leave it", emphasizes the mother from the Council of Parents.
One of the costs of recreational classes that parents often complain about, and which has become established in the past few years, is the recreationist, or animator. The school from the beginning of the text prescribed the existence of recreationists as a condition for bidders in public procurement. This requirement, however, is not present in all public procurements. Despite this, it has become standard agency practice.
"Such a practice was imposed by the requirements for professional animators through the call for Public Procurement. Some average price of recreation on a daily basis is 50 euros, ie 6.000 dinars net. In some earlier times, children mostly stayed in facilities that were intended for the stay of children, which included doctors and animators in addition to common rooms for children to study and stay. Today, there are almost no such facilities. Practice shows that animators who are trained to work with children really give a special quality to these trips", says the president of "Uta".
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