Global Blue or Planet: What Each Takes, and When It Matters

You almost never choose between Global Blue and Planet. The shop chose, months ago, when it signed with one of them, and the form in your hand is whichever company’s form the till prints. So the useful question is not which operator is cheaper. It is what each one publishes, what neither publishes, and which of the deductions you can still change after the form exists.

On that last point the answer is short: the service fee is fixed and invisible, the scheme charge is about a euro, and the only line you genuinely control is the currency the refund is paid in. That one is worth 3% to 5%.

Neither publishes a service fee you can compare

This is the finding, and it is not a gap in my reading. Global Blue and Planet both operate on a deduction from the reclaimable VAT, and neither states that deduction as a percentage of the gross purchase — the number a shopper actually holds in their head — on a page a shopper can find.

What exists instead is a set of third-party estimates that disagree by a factor of seven because they are quoted against four different bases. I worked that reconciliation through in the operator's fee, and which of the four published figures is right; the short version is that once the bases are aligned they converge on roughly €12.50 left per €100 spent at a 20% rate. That band is an industry figure. It is not Global Blue’s number and it is not Planet’s number, because neither company has published one.

So a page that ranks two operators on their service fees is ranking two blanks. I am not going to write one.

What each company does publish

Both publish the ancillary deductions — the small charges around the service fee — and those are comparable, because each states an amount rather than a percentage of an unnamed base.

Planet, in its own Tax Free FAQ, states the card scheme charges directly: “American Express charges £1 and MasterCard €1,” and adds that “the exchange rate used may change over time.” It states a processing target: “We aim to process your refund within 30 days after we receive your validated Planet Tax Free form.” On cash it is candid and unquantified: “At most airports, the agent who gives you the cash refund will charge a separate service fee.”

The same page publishes something more unusual — validation charges at named airports, which most travellers assume do not exist. At Vienna, a digital form has “a €4 fee is automatically deducted from your refund amount,” and a manual form draws “a total fee of €11.” Customs validation itself is free almost everywhere, but Planet lists three places where it is not: Copenhagen at DKK 7.50, Stockholm Arlanda at SEK 10.00, and Vágar in the Faroe Islands at DKK 7.50. Those figures were on the page on 4 September 2026.

Global Blue is harder to quote, and the reason belongs in this post rather than in a footnote. Its customer-services site returned a 503 error on every attempt on 4 September 2026, so I could not read its terms first-hand that day. The figures below are its published terms as reproduced verbatim by TravelUpdate on 20 March 2023: a currency conversion fee “of 3% to 5% of the refund amount in original currency,” a scheme fee under which “an amount up to EUR 1.00 will be deducted from the tax refund per each Tax Free Form,” and the rule that governs which of those applies — “if you want to receive your refund to Visa, MasterCard, and Diners, your credit card account will be credited in the billing currency of your credit card.”

Treat those three as dated to 2023 and unverified against the live page. They are consistent with what I saw applied to forms when I was on the processing side, and they are consistent with the complaint pattern in the same article, but a three-year-old reproduction is weaker evidence than a page you can open. If the conversion band matters to your purchase, ask the refund desk to state it before you sign.

The comparison that is actually available

Read that table for its shape, not its winner. Six of the fourteen cells are “not published,” and the two companies do not leave the same cells blank — which means even the ancillary comparison is being made across different disclosure habits, not across different prices. Planet discloses more. That is a fact about Planet’s website, not evidence that Planet takes less.

When the choice actually matters, and to whom

Three cases, in descending order of how often they come up.

You are a shopper with a form already in your hand. The operator is settled. What is left to you is the payout route and the currency, and those are the same decision on both operators' forms — which is the subject of cash at the airport against credit to the card, published two days after this. Nothing about the brand on the form changes that decision.

You are choosing between two shops selling the same thing, and they use different operators. This is the only case where the brand could decide it, and on published figures it cannot: the service fee is unpublished on both sides, so you would be choosing on a euro of scheme charge against an unknown difference twenty to forty times larger. Choose on the price, the stock and whether the shop will actually complete a form at the till.

You are routing through Vienna, Copenhagen, Stockholm or Vágar. Here the published numbers do bite, and asymmetrically — Planet names a charge at four airports and Global Blue names none, which on the face of it favours Global Blue and on the evidence available means only that one company published something the other did not. If your form is a Planet form and you are leaving through Vienna, the difference between a digital and a manual form is €7 on that page, and getting the digital one is a question you can ask in the shop.

What this does not tell you

It does not tell you which operator returns more money, and no page can honestly claim to until one of them publishes a service fee against the gross price. If either does, this post is the place that changes.

It also does not cover the downtown-refund route, where an operator advances the refund in the shop against your card and reverses it if the customs stamp never arrives. That is a different fee structure and a different risk, and it has its own post later in this run of the plan.

What it does tell you is where to stop looking. The operator’s name on your form is not a variable you control, the euro of scheme charge is not worth an afternoon, and the 3% to 5% currency line is both the largest controllable deduction here and the one nobody mentions at the desk. The full sum this fits into is in what a VAT refund actually pays.

Planet’s figures read from its published Tax Free FAQ on 4 September 2026. Global Blue’s read from its terms as reproduced by TravelUpdate on 20 March 2023; its customer-services site was unreachable on the day of writing. Rules are jurisdictional and they change; this is reporting, not tax or legal advice.

vat-refundrefund-operatorstax-free-shoppingairport-procedurefrance