Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

1142 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE legal order by Act No. 170/2018 Coll. on package travel, linked travel arrangements, certain conditions of engaging in the tourism business, and amending and supplementing certain acts (hereinafter referred to as “New Package Travel Act” or “Package Travel Act”). This act entered into force on 1 January 2019. The transposition period stipulated in Article 28 of the Directive has not been observed. The increasing complexity of consumer legislation, the high professional difficulty of transposing the Directive into national legal order, a sectoral oriented, functional approach typical for the European law, problematic compatibility with the institutes of contract law while maintaining the effort to adopt a comprehensive and understandable legal regulation may be attributed among the reasons leading to the infrigment of the implementation period. First formal question to be dealt with while implementing the Directive was the placement of the rules. Probably, there are mostly opinions that it doesn’t matter whether we have a consumer code, special consumer protection acts, or whether the essential elements of consumer legislation are directly found in the Civil Code, but in the ongoing process of the re-codification of the Slovak private law this still creates the point of never-ending discussion 4 . It is inadvisable to promote form over content, but the link between form and content cannot be underestimated. No solution is likely to be ideal. New Slovak legal regulation effective from 1 January 2019 has excluded a package travel contract from the Civil Code in an effort to comprehensively regulate package travel and linked travel arrangements in the New Package Travel Act 5 . I express my opinion on the placement of these rules particularly because the exclusion of package travel contract from the Civil Code has been considered a very unfortunate step in some informal discussions in Slovakia. In the context of the nature of this new Directive, I do not dare to be so resolute as consumer credits are also regulated outside of the Code, and what can be a more typical civilian relation than the loans and credits to citizens/natural persons apart from purchase, work and lease. A sectoral regulation of tourism might be more 4 NOVOTNÁ, M. (ed.) Zásady európskeho súkromného práva v aplikačnej praxi. Spotrebiteľský kódex: áno či nie? Praha: Leges, 2018, ISBN 978-80-7502-343-8. 5 In comparision to our solution, package travel remains one of the contractual types in the Civil Code in the Czech Republic. Whether this is a better or worse solution than the Slovak one is debatable, since the complexity of the Czech regulation in the Civil Code is slightly weakened by the fact that the legal definition of package or the enumeration of the pre-contractual information obligations that constitute the content of the contract (which is also stated in the Code) including mandatory attachments are contained in the separate act.ct No. 159/1999 Coll. on Certain Business Conditions and the Performance of Certain Activities in the Field of Tourism (Czech Republic).