Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

136 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE I. INTRODUCTION In 1990, the European Community approved the Directive 90/314/EEC, of 13 June 1990, on package travel, package holidays and package tours, which was in effect until 2015, the date on which a new Directive was approved in order to regulate the package holiday that was constituted as a package travel. Nowadays, a package travel is the agreement that considers the previous combination of certain tourist elements that constitute a significant proportion of the package travel, such as transportation, accommodation or any other. A package travel also requires that the service covers a period of more than twenty-four hours or that it includes overnight accommodation and it is sold at a global price 2 . This Directive was transposed to the Spanish Legal System by the Law 21/1995, of July 6, regulating package travel, which was later repealed by Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, of November 16, which approved the consolidated text of the General Consumer and User Protection Act and other complementary laws, whose articles 150 to 165 regulate the contract to this day. The aforementioned Directive 90/314/EEC has been recently reformed through Directive 2015/2302 of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 25 November 2015, on package travel and linked travel arrangements, whose content must be transposed into national law by 1 January 2018 at the latest. Said Directive 2015/2302, in addition to updating the regulation of the package travel to the new market, aims to adapt the scope of the protection of the participants in an organized trip to take into account those developments, to enhance the transparency and legal security for travellers and traders. All these distinctions between the package travel and the linked travel arrangement are known in practice as a dynamic package. The development of the so-called Information Society and, above all, the standardization in the use of new technologies to acquire travel services, whether individual or combined, has led 2 Similar concepts are defended by other authors such as GÓMEZ LOZANO, M.M.: El contrato de viaje combinado, en Contratos Mercantiles, Bercovitz Rodríguez-Cano, A./Calzada Conde, M.A. (coord.), 5.ª ed., Aranzadi, 2013, p. 600, who defines it as an agreement whose object is the previous combination of elements that constitute a significant part of the package travel, provided that it exceeds twenty-four hours or includes one night’s accommodation and it is sold at a total price; and, PASTOR SEMPERE, M.C.: “El viaje combinado en el RDLG 1/2007 (Texto Refundido Ley General de consumidores) y Leyes complementarias”, Cuadernos de Turismo, núm. 25, 2010, p. 105, who defines package travel as the one that has the objective of accomplishing a tourist or holiday travel, providing multiple services (transport, accommodation, certain activities, etc.) that integrate a ‘tourist package’ remunerated at a total price. Regarding the tour operator´s organization as the basis of this contract, SOLER VALDÉS-BANGO, A.: El contrato de viaje combinado , Pamplona, 2005, p. 147, understands that these multiple services correspond to the orderly execution of a series of tangible and intangible services, coordinated both spatially and temporarily, so the package travel is the product of the execution of a plan or project.