Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

1154 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE c) price changes and other changes, withdrawal from a contract, d) responsibility for providing package travel, as these obligations relate to the overall complex of providing travel services that create the package travel. The future will show to what extent this eventuality will be used in application practice. The question of changes to individual contractual relations based on the separate contracts of the traveller with the service providers, as foreseen under Sec. 3 Art. 1 (b) and the legal consequences of these changes to a cover package travel contract, is also considered to be interesting. When considering such options, the following should be taken into account: a) functional aspects that established the responsibility of the intermediary as the organiser of the above-defined combinations of travel services, b) meeting the requirement of travellers to be informed and to exercise their rights under the new legal regulation. Therefore, it is to be assumed that a tour operator in awareness of its status as a “guarantor” of fulfilment of a package travel contract constituted by separate contracts with individual service providers (e.g. in a case when a point of sale is on a website) must have, in the first place, a sufficiently clear and well-defined contractual business relation with individual travel service providers. The limitations resulting from the terms of a package travel contract should also be reflected in the contractual freedom of the parties (travellers as well) in individual separate contracts. Another reality would deny both the new legal regulation and the economic status of the entities concerned. The new set-up of possibilities to create package travel must be preceded by the responsible setting of contractual relations between travel service providers mutually. Considering only the situation when accommodation at the accommodation platform can be cancelled for no reason and penalties whatsoever up to 24 hours before the beginning of the stay combined with an unchangeable and non-refundable flight ticket, it is clear that these partial rules are, compared to the options for unilateral changes of package travel, more favourable in terms of accommodation and less favourable in transport for the traveller. 5. CONCLUSION In the past, the Directive 90/314/EEC created legal basis for responsibility of the tour organiser for performance of the package travel. The New Directive means a further shift, as it also increases the legal responsibility of the average