Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

1092 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE market for package travel and related travel services to all types of companies – with an extreme restriction in which hotels, airlines and other service providers would see their legal status heavily diminished, compared to that which had been in force for a long time. Therefore the transposition of the NPTD cannot be confined to travel agencies by publishing a new law on travel agencies which completely overturns the existing regulatory framework. This creates an anachronistic legal monopoly of package travels and related travel services for those companies, prohibiting the combination of travel services by other service providers. In the light of this new Directive, most companies can legally combine travel services and access an expanded market – since package travel is now much more comprehensive than the traditional tourist package included in a brochure sold within the agency’s premises or marketed online. The European legislator is bringing into the new framework any person, natural or legal, private or public, who combines travel services, regardless of whether they are a travel agency, a hotel, an airline or a car rental. This is the result of the particularly broad definition of “trader” present in Article 3/7 of the NPTD, which includes all face-to-face or online marketing by companies apart from travel agencies: “‘trader’ means any natural person or any legal person, irrespective of whether privately or publicly owned, who is acting, including through any other person acting in his name or on his behalf, for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession in relation to contracts covered by this Directive, whether acting in the capacity of organiser, retailer, trader facilitating a linked travel arrangement or as a travel service provider”. So, while the European legislator broadens the concept of trader to include every natural and collective person, entering the new framework of traveller protection, the Portuguese legislator considerably restricts its field of action. The touristic service providers could only market their own services – a hotel the accommodation, an airline the transport, a car rental the rental of a car –, not being able to combine them with those of other providers. Furthermore, it doesn’t even address Article 3, paragraph 3, of the aforementioned LAVT, which excluded “from the provisions of paragraph 1 [that is, not considering activities befitting to travel agencies] the marketing of services which do not constitute package travels, carried out through telematics or the Internet, by touristic enterprises and transport companies”.