Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

1118 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE This lesson on the high price paid by German taxpayers must quickly be studied in Portugal, where the travellers are not protected and the small companies (retailers) are sacrificed. All of this happens so that large tour operators can escape the annual payment of a guarantee covering a sufficiently high percentage of the turnover. By having a public guarantee fund (FGVT) that is manifestly insufficient to meet the failure of a single medium or large size operator in peak season, Portuguese taxpayers, just like the German ones, may be called upon to pay a substantial bill. The risk in Portugal, compared to Germany, is much greater due to the simple circumstance that our irresponsible low-cost system can attract toxic operators, mostly from another Member State (for example the Low Cost Travel case). They can develop their activity after a modest payment of 2500 euros, but may generate, at the time of their collapse, a loss of several million euros for Portuguese taxpayers, while confining a large number of Portuguese SMEs to bankruptcy. Having passed the deadline for transposition and, above all, having apparently violated the European text, in light of the Dillenkofer case, the Portuguese State bears some responsibility for the situation. 11.7. The effectiveness imposed by the European legislator in Art. 17 is not respected, namely in repatriation, a situation in which travellers have to book and pay for their return flights and trigger a bureaucratic and lengthy reimbursement process to recover the amounts spent. The traveller has three alternatives, according to Article 39/1 LAVT, and neither of them offers a free return flight. He is left to his own devices, paying first and only eventually being reimbursed, depending on the number of travellers involved in the operator’s bankruptcy: 1 st ) Judicial award or the final arbitration decision; 2 nd ) Decision of the Ombudsman Office of APAVT; 3 rd ) Resolution of the Arbitral Commission of the Portuguese Tourism Authority. The effectiveness put forward by the European legislator in Article 17 imposes a fast mechanism like the one revealed in the Monarch (ATOL) bankruptcy, in which the English administration chartered planes and acquired seats on regular