Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

PORTUGAL | CARLOS TORRES 1093 Take the example of a hotel that combines accommodation and golf 3 , whose courses are explored by other companies, creating a week-long package in Algarve. The problem is that Article 3/1/(a), of the Decree-Law No. 17/2008, of 8 March, gives travel agencies a monopoly on the organisation and sale of package travels and, surprisingly, the new category of related travel services: “Activities of travel and tourism agencies 1 –Travel and tourism agencies develop the following activities of their own: a) The organisation and sale of package travel and the facilitation of linked travel arrangements, when the facilitator receives payments from the traveller for services provided by third parties”. The aforementioned monopoly on the combination of travel services comes from Article 4, paragraph 1, the so-called principle of exclusivity: “Article 4 Exclusivity 1 – Only natural or collective persons registered in the National Registry of Travel and Tourism Agencies (RNAVT) or operating under the terms of Article 10/o may exercise in national territory the activities provided for in paragraph 1 of the preceding Article, without prejudice to the provisions of the following paragraphs. 2 – The following are not covered by the exclusives reserved to travel and tourism agencies: 3 The question of whether or not the hotel could market golf packages was, in the first months of 2018, the subject of an advisory opinion from the largest hotel association. From my point of view, it provided rather questionable answers. In the 2nd answer of the aforementioned opinion, the hotelier may sell the golf package as long as the latter does not represent a significant proportion of the value, the association understanding being that “they may not exceed the accommodation services’ values”. However, this is an oversight, as the Directive’s criterion is only 25% or more of the package’s value. Comparing green fees with the price of the room, they usually reach 25%. In the 3rd answer, the aforementioned opinion also excludes the new category of related travel services, as the hotelier could not receive payments from the traveller. It is the facilitator who sells the room and, through the hotel’s website, refers to the golf course that will charge the green fee to the traveller. In the 4th answer, the hotelier can finally combine accommodation and golf when he owns the course (rectius, when the same explorer owns it). This approach seems wrong to me, because what counts is the very broad definition of trader. More than 10 years have passed since this important milestone, Directive 2006/123/EC, better known as Services or Bolkestein Directive. Decree-Law No. 17/2018 is a few decades behind us, and the aforementioned opinion misses the point completely.