Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

ARTICLE 3 | MARC MC DONALD 181 The greater impact of Article 19 seems likely to be on websites that have not acted as travel agents, but have sold their own travel products and then linked into other websites for consumers to buy from separately. These would be principally airlines. They may have to reorganise their accounts to declare their facilitation income and to enable regulator verification of the amount. The desire to explore ways around Article 19 is likely to be greatest among them. Again, assuming a percentage figure will be key for calculating facilitator security, much attention will focus on the size of that figure and on its relationship with the other percentage figures, whatever they may be. Given the quite different business model of facilitators, their reduced exposure to overseas supplier contracts and the fact that many LTA’s will involve separate payments going direct to the linked website and not the facilitator, it would seem that both the 10% and 4% figures may be too high. A possible figure of 2% or less is at this time purely speculative. Whatever the figure turns out to be, it will have to be clearly identifiable as the facilitation security for the LTA facilitation part of the travel business in much the same way as, at present, when a travel business has both tour operator and travel agents bonds, each security has to be kept separate for the different insolvency losses. 9. CONCLUSION The consultation phase leading up to the enactment of Directive 2015/2302 has heavily influenced the extension of compulsory insolvency security to facilitators of LTA’s. For this writer the absence of convincing evidence of the need for this extension and the differing treatment of airlines and facilitators, raises questions over the real motivation for the extension and, in turn, whether Article 19 complies with wider principles of EU law. However, until the ECJ decides on this question, one must accept the Directive as it stands. Once the confusion over whether a travel arrangement is a package or an LTA settles down, what may happen, assuming any challenge to Article 19 fails, is that the distinction between a package and an LTA may force the market to alter itself, rather than reflect the market and, indeed, rather than make it safer or more efficient. Some facilitators may decide to leave the facilitation market if the cost of security is too high. The market may become less flexible. The need to prove to a regulator, on whatever periodic basis a MS uses to check on their security, and to get clearance before doing business differently, will at least in the short term,