Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

ROMANIA | ILIE DUMITRU 1123 Moreover, the Romanian Government Ordinance no. 2/2018, which is the law declared to be the transposition in Romania of the Directive (EU) 2015/2302, is more a translation of the European Directive than a transposition of it. This situation is the cause of even more severe difficulties in applying Directive (EU) 2015/2302, which is additional to those resulting from the content of its articles, as we will see below. II. INFORMING THE TRAVELLER IN THE PRE-CONTRACT PHASE The obligation of a travel agency, whether it is an organiser or retailer 3 , to provide the traveller with a series of information before concluding the contract, is an application of a very well-known law principle, generally applicable in the consumer protection branch of law. In the past, it was considered that the information of the contractor is an obligation only when it is expressly provided for by law. In the other situations, it was stated that in a liberal society, made up of free and responsible people, it was the opposite: each person has the duty to inform himself/herself in order to participate to the conclusion of any contract in full knowledge of the cause. Meanwhile, economic, social and technical realities have changed and the opportunities for self-information of participants in the civil and commercial circuit have become unequal. This is because, owing to the development of society in an ever-accelerating dynamics, both legislator and jurisprudence have been in a position to respond to the many constraints inherent in the consumer society, given that many times, apart from the so-called category of “professionals”, the majority of the population is not capable, however well informed, of drawing all the conclusions required by the technical complexity of the goods and services which are the object of the contracts whose conclusion is proposed or the legal subtlety of the clauses which make up the content of conventions imposed on it (adhesion contracts, forced contracts, standard contracts, etc.). Considering these facts and taking into account that information inequality, like economic inequality, can harm the contractual balance and that better safe 3 We will use these terms in this paper with their meaning in Article 3 Paragraph 8 and 9 of the Directive (EU) 2015/2302: “organiser” means a trader who combines and sells or offers for sale packages, either directly or through another trader or together with another trader, or the trader who transmits the traveller’s data to another trader; “retailer” means a trader other than the organiser who sells or offers for sale packages combined by an organiser.