The figure was revealed by interim head of the Freedom and Freedom Personal Travel Advisors, Matt Harding, at the group’s annual conference in Lapland this week.

“Some of you have never surcharged your customers so there was no change, but the majority of you did and this brought additional cost to each sale,” he said.

“With the backing of Thomas Cook Group we negotiated these down, including a change to charge cards from July – what that’s meant in reality is we have seen a swing from debit cards into credit cards and Bacs payments are now 20% of our transactions.”

Elsewhere, Harding revealed that Freedom had tightened controls and processes internally and “will continue to do so”.

“We have removed some members for activities that we won’t condone and we continue to work closely with Profit to ensure that we protect the image of the industry we work in,” he said.