The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry

– the travellers should be able to use the vouchers towards payment for any transport services or package travel offered by the carrier or organiser; – subject to availability and irrespective of any fare or price difference, the organisers should ensure that the vouchers allow travellers to book a package travel contract with the same type of services or of equivalent quality as the terminated package; – the organisers should consider extending the possibility to use the vouchers for bookings with other entities that form part of the same group of companies; – if the package travel was booked through a travel agency or other intermediary, the organisers should allow the vouchers to be used for new bookings also through the same travel agency or another intermediary; – the vouchers should be transferable to another traveller without any additional cost if the providers of the services included in the package agree to the transfer without any additional cost; – the vouchers should be issued on a durable medium, such as email or paper, indicate their validity period and specify all the rights attached to them; and – the organisers are recommended to offer added value to vouchers than the value of the service originally booked, to make them more attractive. The Commission invites the Member States to actively consider setting up guarantee schemes for vouchers to ensure that in the event of insolvency of the issuer of the voucher, passengers or travellers are reimbursed. They also may decide whether to introduce specific measures to provide support to operators to ensure that reimbursement claims caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are satisfied and, following the bankruptcy of a carrier or organiser, to cover reimbursement claims of passengers or travellers. In the worst-case scenario, the Temporary Framework on State aid measures to support the economy in the current COVID-19 crisis adopted by the Commission could intervene. Based on Article 107(3)(b) of the Treaty, it would provide a basis for liquidity support, by allowing operators receive, among other, direct grants, tax advantages, State guarantees for loans and subsidised public loans. In other words, according to the Commission, the alternative to liquidity problems arising from the fact that all travellers may opt for a cash refund seems to be the financial support to tour operators: as a matter of fact, the vouchers that the organisers may offer to passengers or travellers, as an