Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

ROMANIA | ILIE DUMITRU 1133 or the organiser’s commitments regarding the amounts of pre-payments he may accept and their timing before the start of the package”. Although ensuring fair competition at European Union level is one of the objectives 14 of Directive (EU) 2015/2302, this Directive only generically provides the need for passenger protection schemes in the event of the insolvency of the organizing agency, without establishing concrete modalities and economic values according to which a unitary Union-wide travel package guaranteeing system be implemented. However, this lax regulation leads to regulatory discrepancies and inequality in the treatment of EU travel organisers. However, the way in which this system of passenger protection is regulated in each Member State is of particular importance. The fulfillment by the organisers of the tourist packages of the obligations established in the national legislation represents, from an economic point of view, a cost, which the respective organiser has to bear. And costs affect directly and impressively the economic performance (profit) of any company. In other words, the obligations imposed by the national legislation on the protection of passengers in the event of insolvency affect the competitiveness of the organisers. And since the European Union, through the provisions of Directive (EU) 2015/2302, left the Member States free to regulate national passenger protection systems, it is undeniable that the exigence level and a lesser or greater rigor of one state or another will benefit organisers in some Member States and will harm others in other Member States, although they all compete in the Single Market of the European Union. Specifically, compared to the Romanian legislation requiring the value of the guarantee held by an organiser to be at least equal to the difference between the total sums received from travellers for tourist services not yet provided and the amounts paid to the tourist services providers, Norway’s legislation, for example, imposes on organisers in that country the value of the guarantee to be at least equal to the total turnover in a month 15 . 14 See paragraph 14 of the preamble of the Directive (EU) 2015/2302. 15 According to Norwegian Package Travel Regulations, the travel guarantee is calculated based on one month’s budgeted or actual guarantee-liable turnover. The guarantee-liable turnover is set at the average of budgeted guarantee-liable turnover for three consecutive calendar months for the coming year, where the second month is the month with the year’s highest budgeted guarantee-liable turnover.